MindJolt, the game distribution company that was acquired by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this year, has landed a big new parter: Broadcast Interactive Media (BIM).
That name probably doesn’t ring a bell, but BIM helps run the online presences for hundreds of local television networks, newspapers, and radio stations across the country (here’s an example Fox station out of Illinois). Now, BIM is going to offer these 900 publisher partners access to MindJolt’s library of casual games. And those sites represent a lot of eyeballs: MindJolt says that it’s going to be exposed to 110 million people per month through the partnership.
MindJolt has a catalog of 1,300 casual games, which it distributes across partner sites as well as its own game portal MindJolt.com and a Facebook application that has over 10 million monthly active users. Between these channels MindJolt reaches 20 million players per month.
MindJolt COO Colin Digiaro says that the goal with the BIM partnership is to help these local news sites boost engagement — many people only visit them when local news is breaking, and these sites want to change that. Games may not be the first thing you think about when you head to a local news site, but Digiaro says that there’s a “high degree of overlap” between people who visit these local news sites and those who play MindJolt games. That said, it will be up to the publisher sites to determine how prominently they want to feature the games, so the impact will likely vary a lot from site to site.
MindJolt also recently launched a monetization product called AdJolt, which includes ads and a virtual goods system. These revenues get split between the game developer, MindJolt, and the publisher parter site, but MindJolt declined to get into specifics as far as how much would be going to BIM in this partnership.
The company did say that since launching AdJolt, it has increase the revenue of game developer partners by 50-70%, and that it’s doubled MindJolt revenue in 90 days.
MindJolt has a few competitors, including HeyZap and Mochi Media, both of which also let publishers embed a large library of casual games and monetize them.