Boomerang Brings Crowdsourcing To Ad Offers

This week Boomerang Offerwall announced its entry into the ad offer space, with a new crowdsourced product that may set it apart from its rivals. Where most ad offer networks serve ad offers based primarily on location, Boomerang Offerwall allows users who've accepted an offer to rate it with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Highly-rated offers rise to the top of the offerwall so they'll be visible to as many users as possible, while poorly-rated offers will sink to the bottom or be removed outright by Boomerang. 

The Boomerang Offerwall also collects demographic data about users, primarily age and gender. Boomerang does this to help keep track of what types of ad offers work best in various game communities. Right now Boomerang Offerwall is available in 10 "large" games and 15 "small to medium-sized" games, according to Boomerang Networks CEO Honor Gunday. Few ad offers perform consistently at the top in all games. Instead, each game community develops distinct offer preferences. 

Gunday says Boomerang Offerwall's main value add for consumers is letting them rate offers as they appear in their favorite games. The alternative offered by competitors forces users to simply pick manually through whatever offers happen to be available. As a result, Gunday says Boomerang Offerwall is unusual in that 80% to 90% of its revenue is directly generated by users accepting ad offers in its platforms. 

Competing ad offer platforms, Gunday says, actually make most of their revenue through direct payments.  To him, that's a clear sign that users aren't able to easily find quality offers on competing platforms. While Boomerang does generate some revenue through users paying directly for virtual currency, he says it's only 10% to 20% of the company's revenue stream. Boomerang is able to stick primarily to offers because of how much its crowdsourcing engine lifts conversion rates. 

Big Money For Sticky Games

Gunday says developers using Boomerang Offerwall are reporting conversion rates varying from 15% to as high as 35%, depending on the size and engagement factor of the game. In smaller games, Boomerang is unable to offer as much lift because there aren't enough users available to review offers quickly. In larger games, conversion lift happens more quickly and can get much higher. Highly-rated offers in large games have a tendency to "go viral" and get accepted by lots of users. 

"There's virality, gameplay, design, the niche appeal… all of those things influence the result. The competitive landscape influences the result, too, since competitors tend to clone each other's games," said Gunday. "We work with any developer regardless of size, but our algorithm does a better job when you have an extremely engaged audience.

Revenues for games using Boomerang Offerwall tend to increase from roughly 15% to 20%, depending mostly on the game's engagement factor. Gunday says in smaller client games without a lot of stickiness, eCPM tends to be around $40. In one particular game that Gunday describes as "highly engaging," eCPM has gotten as high as $1040 due to users "going crazy" once they hit the offerwall. He says what type of offers users prefer can affect eCPM, as many demographics tend to prefer offers worth relatively small amounts of money. 

"There is a company called TrialPay that focuses on high quality, high payout offers. I think they're having problems with conersions, becuase not many people want to take expensive subscriptions," said Gunday.  

Converting The World

While Gunday says Boomerang Offerwall is already performing well in US market, a particular focus of the company is international monetization. The company already divides its employees between San Francisco and an office in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, which Gunday says allows Boomerang to deliver true 24-hour customer service to users. 

Boomerang aggregates ad inventory from roughly 129 different networks worldwide. Geotargeting makes sure users see only applicable offers, but Gunday finds that the user rating system lifts conversion in territories where users tend to prefer certain types of offers. A game's offer preference can also be dictated by simple demographic factors.

"We have a game that has a predominantly female over-30 American audience. These users typically take book club offers and music club offers. We have another game that also serves the US, but it's a mafia type game. In that one, the audience is younger males, 17 to 28. They take free offers like surveys and mobile offers like ringtone subscriptions," said Gunday. "If you look at different countries, in Malaysia it's surveys and mobile offers don't do well. Asia doesn't want to pay money." 

Gunday believes a company that focuses only on monetizing one market, whether it's the US or Europe, is leaving money on the table. So Boomerang Offerwall is already serving users in Latin America, Asia, and Europe with fully-localized suites of offers in a variety of languages including French, German, Hindi, and Chinese. He says most of the localization was done in-house by employees, many of whom speak multiple languages. Gunday himself speaks seven and hired employees specifically to handle Italian and Vietnamese localizations. 

Converting The Future

Right now Gunday says that most of Boomerang Offerwall's clients are social games, along with a few MMO portals. The company is in talks with some virtual worlds and also hopes to roll out a service that would let users accept ad offers in order to pay for monthly subscription fees in games supporting virtual currency. Gunday envisions users accepting perhaps $15 to $20 worth of ad offers, then spending that virtual currency on their next month or so of premium service. 

With the ad offers space flourishing, it's somewhat startling to realize that Boomerang Offerwall's crowdsourced recommendations engine appears to be the first of its kind. Right now the company has some impressive figures to back up its technology, but the company and service are still young enough that Gunday cannot name partners specifically. How Boomerang Offerwall performs once it hits mainstream social games like Zynga and Playdom's titles may say much about the company's future in the US. 

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