The Tapjoy advertising network is again under pressure from Apple. Glu Mobile has already lowered its financial forecasts for the fourth quarter in this regard. Tapjoy denies everything.
There was a little scandal the other day. The essence of what happened boils down to one small article on the Techcrunch portal, in which the applications promoted by the Tapjoy service are called garbage, and in addition, it is announced that the service itself is being harassed by Apple.
What is it about
Tapjoy and similar networks work according to the following scheme. For example, you are using a mobile application that has a game currency. As an option, any crystals. And you want to use these crystals to build some beautiful house in your application. It is clear that you have no desire to pay for them. This is where Tapjoy comes to the rescue. He offers you to download an application, and for this he gives you a certain number of crystals.
The application that is being asked to download may be paid, it may be free, but, in any case, it is, as Michael Arrington stated in his article on Techcrunch, far from the best quality. For the fact that someone downloaded the application, the Tapjoy network authors of the downloaded application pay money.
As a result, at first glance, everyone is happy. And the users, because they did not have to pay for crystals, and the developers of the advertised application, because thanks to downloads their application came out in the top, and the advertising network itself, because it earned money. The problem is that in this way low-quality projects with a large marketing budget can get into free tops.
Realizing this, Apple has been struggling with incentives for a long time. In April 2011, the company banned applications with such offervalls. However, then the networks quickly found a solution: they moved their “walls of proposals” to HTML pages opened by the browser.
But, according to the publisher Glu Mobile (and to whom Techcrunch mainly refers), a regular Tapjoy customer, it’s time for a new stage of confrontation. Apple began to put pressure on applications promoted through incentives. However, it is not entirely clear how she does it, but the result is already there: in the third quarter, Glu Mobile’s revenues with Tapjoy fell by 13%.
More precisely, the management of the British company associates this downgrade with the tightening of Apple’s policy regarding applications promoted in this way. Moreover, in this regard, Glu management even canceled the release of four of its five projects in the current fourth quarter.
Network Response
Tapjoy reacted to the article instantly. The executive director of the advertising network Mihir Sha (Mihir Shah) said that Apple weekly introduces hundreds of applications that support Tapjoy. In addition, according to him, the “apple” company in recent months has introduced several applications that also work with the advertising network. However, what explains the 13% drop in Glu’s profit, Mobile Shah did not specify, calling the article an “attack”.