Most mobile ads take up valuable game-playing space. At Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a new gaming ad platform, Tap Me, especially designed for mobile games, launches today. Tap Me was developed by game developers with the advertising integrated into the game.
Tap Me's current testing shows engagement rates of players choosing sponsored power-ups as high as 20%, and in certain games above 50%. These engagement rates, while early, are unprecedented, particularly in comparison to traditional banner ad click-through rates, which typically linger below 1%.
Tap Me has made many tools available to developers, including categorizing content, sponsored leader boards, meta tag classifications, new ad real estate opportunities, and performance metrics.
The Tap Me platform gives game players incentives and content, while
providing a new method of advertising that does not interrupt game play
and includes real-world rewards for the gamer.
Players initiate and get to choose which participating sponsors they
want to involve in their game play. For example, a player can choose to
get more endurance or speed from, say, Nike or Gatorade, two companies
that could hypothetically associate their brands by sponsoring these
types of relevant, meta-tagged attributes in games.
Currently, there are nearly 300 million gamers worldwide; mobile users
spend more time on their mobile devices playing games and social
networking (47%) than they do making phone calls and sending messages
(32%). Tap Me provides an alternative to monetize through advertising
that is in-context, simple to integrate, scalable and, for the first
time, plays on the natural strengths of games as a medium.
As part of its official unveiling, Tap Me has opened up the beta to their iOS integration library and its web based management tools. Beginning today, Tap Me welcomes iPhone and iPad app developers to visit http://tap.me/wp/how-it-works, sign-up and download its integration library for iOS and support documentation to get started. Tap Me also has plans to extend support to other mobile platforms, such as Android, to follow shortly.
iComplishments Problem/Solution from Tap Me on Vimeo.
It's like the sponsorships on social games where you get virtual goods. It will appeal to many developers, if the sponsors list is good.