Are the OMGPOP developers the luckiest team in tech? It certainly seems that way. Gaming behemoth Zynga snapped up the tiny game company back in March just as Draw Something’s daily active users hit its peak of around 15 million. Since then, users have steadily declined. Zynga has made big moves to attempt to Read More
Oversharers, beware: if you’ve recently tweeted anything embarrassing–say, how much you drank last night–be prepared to confront ads that directly address your tweets. For example: If you’re browsing a website even without being logged into its Twitter functionality, you might get served a banner ad about a hangover cure, or deals on Stoli.
It’s a new form of big brother-esque hyper-targeted advertising from New York-based startup LocalResponse that, according to a press release, “delivers more relevant ads across all platforms by learning from public consumer intent expressed over public social media channels.” Read More
Pictionary-like game Draw Something continues to endure a steep decline in players. AppData reports that since March, the number of users logging into the app via Facebook has fallen from 14.5 million a day to 7.6 million, almost halving Draw Something’s daily active users.
With interest in the game quickly ebbing, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Zynga is attempting to justify the $183 million it spent to acquire Draw Something and its parent company OMGPOP by tacking on yet more ads to the flailing game. Because if there’s one thing game players love, it’s ads, obviously. Read More
Zynga’s stock price is dropping, so now the San Francisco-based company is attempting to devise creative ways to monetize some of its more popular games. Yesterday we reported that Draw Something is hemorrhaging users, but that hasn’t stopped its new parent company from thrusting more ads upon the once wildly-popular game. Read More
Less than a month ago we reported that Draw Something had ousted Angry Birds from the highly coveted top paid app spot, but it would appear that success was really Draw Something’s plateau: just six weeks after Zynga acquired the New York-based app shop, its user numbers have dwindled considerably. Read More
The App Store official charts for last week showed the new version of an old standby, Angry Birds in Space, at no. 1 and hometown heroes OMGPOP at no. 2 with Draw Something. But a look at the charts today shows Draw Something is now the no. 1 most downloaded paid app, beating out other popular games Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Where’s My Water and Fancy Pants as well as the app-ified Suess classic, The Lorax. The iPhone/iPad version has five stars with 94,481 ratings. Read More
The new tech site primed by Matt Buchanan (Gizmodo) and John Herrman (Popular Mechanics) is here: FWD, “tech for humans.” The section’s inaugural post already has 18 WIN votes. BuzzFeed/FWD will write about tech, tech culture, and culture that has something to do with the Internet, which is basically everything now. Read More
BuzzFeed announced its next fully staffed beta will be (as we suspected) tech coverage. The startup has poached again to fill out the new masthead, nabbing Matt Buchanan from Gizmodo and John Herrman from Popular Mechanics. The two bloggers are BuzzFeed’s lastest in a string of hires from other publications that included Rosie Gray of the Village Voice and Doree Shafrir of RollingStone.com.
Mr. Smith “had admired the work Matt did at Gizmodo and had him and John recommended to me by a long list of people I really trust,” he told Betabeat in an email. Read More
Remember when Hipster.com launched with a splash page and some incentives to tweet or whatever, and it went totally viral before no one even knew what it was? (We still don’t know!) Well, New York-based Wander has done them one better, soaring to new heights of social media insanity with a completely baseless viral marketing campaign. Already it’s been endorsed by @FAKEGRIMLOCK and Chris Messina and blogged about by Wired. What is it? “Love the typography on Wander…! Curious what this site will be about… did you reserve your username yet?” Mr. Messina wrote on Google+.
The “incentiveless” sign-up process (in the words of Wander’s co-founder and CEO Jeremy Fisher, formerly of Dinevore) consists of a splash page and a leaderboard. Read More
