If you’re reading into the OfferPal layoffs story that the ‘offer wall’ model itself is what is stuttering, think again.
With $1M in funding under its belt, Israeli MATOMY is announcing today the ‘Engage Bar‘, an offer wall based JavaScript widget that I expect many publishers will clamor for.
If you’re an offer wall hater though, start sharpening your pitchfork.
MATOMY’s Engage Bar floats on top of the browser—of the type popularized by Meebo. See it laid on top of a TechCrunch post, here. Its purpose is a two-fold increase in monetization and, as its name suggests, engagement.
Although the Engage Bar can be used by publishers of all sorts (virtual currency, micro transactions sites, etc.), MATOMY is focusing its efforts on publishers of social games with virtual currency hooks, stand-alone games and MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game publishers. This makes sense business-wise, as offer walls are proven to work well in this space.
From the monetization standpoint, the Engage Bar’s main allure for game publishers is that it reduces friction. Ordinarily, users have to proactively launch an offer wall after they’ve reached a certain point in a game, need to add virtual currency, or buy virtual goods of some sort.
With MATOMY’s Engage Bar, publishers can engage users at all times, enticing them with offers throughout their game play—remember, the bar remains persistent on the browser footer. MATOMY claims that removing the need for that proactive action by the user has a significant effect on monetization. The Bar can also be used to communicate to users via direct messages.
Publishers can target users based on language and geography, on top of automatic user-to-offer optimization that MATOMY performs behind the scenes. There are 3,000 international offers, ranging from watching videos, filling out surveys and signing-up for product trials. Publishers can even tie in the bar to their back-end via API and prompt offers based on virtual currency balances.
One thing definitely going for MATOMY is that it’s headed by a skilled media executive named Erez Sadan. He was previously the Interactive Advertising SVP at 888.com and more recently the COO of performance marketing network AdsMarket, whose latest funding we recently covered.
The company raised its funding from Ilan Shiloah and Nir Tarlovsky. This was a private investment of theirs, rather than one made through their investment outfit, The Time.
