Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is acquiring video game ad network GamerDNA and engagement advertising platform BrandPort to add advertising capabilities for game publishers.
As you may know, Live Gamer’s e-commerce platform powers virtual goods merchandising, analytics, virtual item gifting, support for earned in-game currencies, item storefronts, catalog management, payments gateways, cash-in flows, and more for publishers. Live Gamer has scored a number of other notable partnerships to power micropayments for gaming companies, including a deal with gaming giant EA, THQ Sony, and Real Networks.
GamerDNA is the fifth largest gamer-focused advertising network in the U.S. and Europe, reaching over 48 million total unique visitors per month worldwide. GamerDNA connects advertisers to popular gaming sites, which focus mostly on hard core gaming. Advertisers such as Blizzard, Best Buy, KFC, Ubisoft, Sony Online and Namco all have leveraged the GamerDNA network to acquire new users.
BrandPort, which has been rebranded as Live Gamer Ad Elements, provides media and publisher partners with video ad serving, targeting, optimization, and reporting infrastructure. The platform will reward users who view featured daily video ads with virtual goods, content or currency.
Live Gamer says that BrandPort’s video ad platform improves monetization rates of free-to-play games to upwards of 40% of total users from the typical 10% of microtransaction-only paying users. In testing the company has seen over 96% of users view all daily offered high-CPM videos, resulting in approximately $1 in incremental revenue per viewing user (ARPVU) per month.
Live Gamer President and Co-Founder Andy Schneider tells us that creating the ability for game publishers to monetize off of advertising made a lot of sense and is complimentary to the company’s e-commerce platform. And the new ad offering helps retain customers through offers like rewards.
These aren’t the first acquisitions for Live Gamer. In 2009, the company acquired microtransaction platform Twofish, and Korean startup N-Cash, a global microtransaction company.
We sat down with Schneider for a TechCrunchTV interview, where he explains how GamerDNA and BrandPort are going to be used in the future.