Chartboost, a startup that provides mobile game discovery and monetization methods to its users, announced on January 8 that it had raised $19 million from a Series B funding round. The financing was led Sequoia Capital and also included previous investors TransLink Capital and SK Telecom Ventures. Chartboost has been growing at an incredible pace and is getting great reviews from users which is a major accomplishment for the startup that is only 14 months old.
The reason for the firms rapid ascent may be because it tries to solve a mobile app developers two biggest headaches. The first issue is that new apps get lost in the vast ocean of other apps. Secondly, app developers are having a hard time monetizing the users of their mobile applications. Chartboost resolves these headaches by letting its users cross-promote their applications with in the network. For now games for the iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire platforms are supported.
The platform has attracted 300 million unique active devices and has 6 billion game sessions per month that are played on 12,000 games. According to Chartboost this makes them the world’s largest mobile games-only network. The company turned one year old in November 2012 and has seen seen a 50 percent growth since then. Mobile developers on the platform include the whose who of the sector including Supercell, TinyCo, PocketGems, Kiloo, Get Set Games, and many others.
The business model for Chartboost has three channels for revenue and growth. Developers can choose to cross-promote their own games within their own portfolio. Users also have the option of direct cross-promotion partnership deals that can be struck with other mobile game developers. This allows the two parties to share traffic and users. Both these options are free for users and can be used outside of the platform using an API.
The final option is a paid service called the Direct Deals Marketplace. Game developers can buy or sell excess inventory as part of the company’s internal traffic exchange that is very transparent. Chartboost get a cut of the revenue while publishers can test out their campaign on thousands of games. It seems like a win-win situation that will help the company grow even bigger in the future.
Source: Pandodaily
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