Mochi Media, a well-financed San Francisco startup that operates a decentralized network of Flash-based online games and gaming websites and offers developers a way to distribute, monetize and get statistical information about their games, sure has done a good job growing its network to a significant size since it debuted its public beta product back in October 2007.
Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore’s measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company’s claim that the so-called ‘extended network’ is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now.
Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the ‘Online Gaming’ category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi’s network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you’d expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media’s reach worldwide.
It’s worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries.
I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue – the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media – but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates “in the low to mid-teens” for the U.S. and the UK.
Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things.
Keep your eyes on this one, folks.
How are they different from the recently launched site heyzap?
HeyZap uses MochiAds’ games feed to populate their widget.
The name and logo is better.
thats interesting to see profit based on games especially during financial crisis
Thats the power of online business… your target audience is whole world wide web… this is encouraging for anyone and everyone who wants to start on their own… way ahead than yahoo or msn games…
No Mochi in my comScore ranking “online gaming” ???????
Total Internet : Total Audience 1.108.031
Online Gaming 429.857
Spil Games 48.934
Yahoo! Games 45.179
MSN Games 36.617
MINICLIP.COM 35.997
WildTangent Network 34.381
EA Online 31.481
Travian Games 29.328
April 2009
Weird, I see it just fine, obviously. Are you sure you’re not excluding the ‘extended networks’?
Ohh yeah right .. but isn’t this traffic that has been re-routed through others? So in fact it is traffic from other portals … right?
That pretty much sums up what Mochi Media does, yes. It’s a distributed model, Mochi embeds technology in Flash content that gets pushed to tens of thousands of websites, while portals generally have more of a pull strategy.
Ok thanks!
But then they are no competitor of SPIL Games or Yahoo …
In fact this only shows how many people are playing games that have mochi technolgy in it …
Funny that you position it as they have beaten Yahoo, MSN or SPIL Games
I’m not saying they ‘beat’ anyone, but the visit numbers are best put into context when compared to the traffic for portals. Nobody’s stopping Yahoo, MSN or Spil to switch to a push strategy
Congrats to Mochi on that audience size, but if they’re charing a CPM ‘in the teens’ they aren’t sharing that with their developers – most developers get $0.50 CPM or less. Go look on the mochi forums to confirm:
https://www.moc...just-in-game-ad
The 0.50 CPM (or less) is the average for all ads. Video pre-rolls have a much higher CPM.
I think one of their first video pre-rolls where from Nokia, displayed in the UK. There was some cheering going on at the Mochi forum when game developers noticed the CPM going up.
I don’t think they’re selling too many of those video ads. Advertisers would be crazy to pay that when their ad is going to be on a typical flash game site, surrounded by a bunch of ‘intimate dating’, ‘you have a crush’, and ‘get your emoticons’ now ads…
The guys and girls at Mochi really now what they are doing. They release feature after feature that game developers and site owners like and they do it at a fast pace.
One example is the high score API, which is easy for developers to integrate and provides value for site owners. And of course adds fun for the people who actually play the games.
We have a lot of games with Mochi in them at Multigames.com and there is never any trouble. And being able to extract the high score data really adds value.
I cannot even seem to attract 1 million pizza lovers a year to http://www.worstpizza.com daily, and they get 100 million a month! Maybe I should open up a pizza flash game!
How many times are you gonna plug that site of yours? No one’s going to go there.
D’oh, worked for me. Just too stupid this sh*t.
How is this new? I thought techcrunch breaks news?
http://gigaom.c...onthly-uniques/
I read that too, but it’s hard to verify when companies share their internal stats. Now that they’re measured by comScore for the first time, we get a detailed overview of their actual traction compared to similar ventures.
Good article, the advertisment is sold?
Mochi has been a runaway success with many websites including mine (www.nirgame.com) getting a good source for flash games. Recently Hi5 has announced sourcing games from Mochi.
Are they making a profit? FTA: “A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue”
Online gaming is a very popular business these days. No wonder mochi ads is earning that much profit.
Sounds like a great idea, and their push method would do well, even if web traffic overall went down.
mochi!!!!!
Offtopic…
Those Australian motherfuckers are extreme racists.. Still they are living in slavery under british flag. Gay tribal fuckers.
Ontopic…
Mochi sounds good. I am liking this more than HeyZap.
online gaming will drop off when people realize they are wasting their time and need to make money.
this is why most of their traffic is from over seas; peoples in america is serious now; foreigners are still fck’n stupid; always have been thoughs.
i like real mochi, i think their name and logo are good; i don’t play game no more; if i did, i’d play WOW.
You’re a dumbass.
We serve up ~4500 MochiAds enabled games 250,000 times on average each day at http://www.fupa.com/.
Mochi is really on fire. Happy to be along for the Ride Fupa.com. Which also seems to be doing quite well on Comscore
They still need to figure out how to make more money. What developers make is abysmal, and they can definitely do better.
Great business model.
Mochi is no longer selling this inventory in the US. They struck a deal with WildTangent to sell the US inventory, given their unparalleled ability to draw major advertisers to gaming opportunities. This really solidifies WT as the top dog in terms of ad-supported gaming.