Hi5 Partners With Mochi Media For More Games And Goods

Today social network Hi5 announced a partnership with Mochi Media that is all the more noteworthy given the massive round of layoffs the company just survived. Mochi Media is a company that serves both ads and Flash games. The partnership would begin bringing Mochi's total catalogue of over 7,000 Flash games immediately into Hi5's games service with support for purchasing virtual items with Hi5 Coins.

"Mochi Media has a proven track record of providing quality, highly
monetizable online games, which aligns perfectly with our core value
proposition of providing a more fun and interactive experience for our
users," said Akash Garg, CTO of hi5. "Working with such a large online
games platform with thousands of game titles, hi5 will be able to provide a
wider array of popular games to our users, serve as another distribution
platform for developers, and create new forms of monetization for our
business."

The initial offering from Mochi will be over 200 games retooled to support purchase of in-game items and game-related status upgrades with Hi5 Coins, the network's universal virtual currency. Later releases will follow, presumably, as support for Hi5 Coins is developed into the games. Hi5 Games will begin serving MochiAds advertising during play, which lets Mochi also turn a profit on the deal and hopefully attracts more developers to Hi5's platform. 

"Mochi Media's catalog of online games provides socially engaging content
for the hi5 Games channel," said Justin Wong, vice president of business
development at Mochi Media. "Through this partnership we will offer Hi5's
62 million monthly unique users with non-stop, interactive entertainment,
while providing a wider reach for advertisers and developers."

Mochi Media primarily publishes games by third-party developers for sites as diverse as social networks, GamePost, MindJolt, and the Huffington Post political news site, according to Venture Beat. The service reaches 100 million unique users a month and monetizes primarily by use of different types of ads packaged into various points of the games. This includes pre-roll ads, in-game ads, and "peel away" ads.

It appears at this point that all of the ads will remain intact for Mochi Media games on Hi5. Typically Mochi splits ad revenue with the developers of its Flash games. It is not clear if the ads will be added to Hi5's original games or how Mochi intends to split ad revenue with Hi5 games. Since Hi5 will essentially be letting Mochi serve its ads to its network of 62 million users, it would seem unlikely that Hi5 isn't getting at least a small cut.

The deal with Mochi Media represents a massive expansion of Hi5's gaming catalogue, as the Hi5 games serviced launched with only forty titles back in February. There can be little doubt that games and currency sales is the revenue streams Hi5 is betting on to make up for the company's recent, problematic failure to obtain venture capital funding.

To some extent Hi5 has to bet on virtual goods, though, since its userbase of 62 million is spread out over at least 33 different countries. International users generally aren't attractive to most advertisers, who want to target particular national markets. By contrast, virtual goods are a proven way to monetize users in Europe and other parts of the world just as easily as users in America.

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