In Brief: RockYou Says June Was Best Month Yet
RockYou, both one of the largest developers and largest ad networks on the Facebook Platform, has positive news to report on the advertising front: the company tells us that revenues from its ad operations hit an all-time high in June.
While RockYou hasn’t disclosed revenues, it did say eCPMs across its network have roughly doubled since January – a sign of strength for the company’s social network advertising efforts, and the industry overall. RockYou’s report gels with what we’re hearing from others in the space – that eCPMs are growing and the market overall appears to have stabilized.
In addition to its ad network, RockYou also sells integrated sponsorships into its applications and monetizes through direct to consumer virtual currency sales in its games, like Speed Racing, shown below.
RockYou has raised $68 million in four rounds of funding. The company operates one of the largest networks of widgets and distributed applications across Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, and Bebo.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Things must really not be going well at RockYou if they needed this type of PR. In January, they were just starting to ramp up their Ad Sales team. In fact, their current VP of Ad Sales (and wife of her boss, the CRO) didn’t even join the company until February. Given these facts, you’d expect the VP of Sales to require 4-5 months to ramp up. That brings us to today. The fact that “ramped up” means that revenue is only 2x where it was before they had a dedicated team is kind of pathetic. At least they have $68MM in the bank to let them die a slow painful death (as I have no idea who would want to buy them).
July 15th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Hmm, it’s true that eCPM was GREAT at the end of June. Since the 1st of July, the eCPM has plummeted to a 1/4th of what it was the day before.
Did they desperately need the press that they would even artificially inflate eCPM’s, just to let it fall again?
July 15th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
This is BS. RockU is dying a slow death. there is no way their overall cpms doubled across their entire network unless they stopped serving ads to 80% of their inventory and focused on the premium stuff. I see all app networks as dead. You can sugar coat your app network with gimmicky personal ads but lets face it, its all smoke and mirrors app inventory for the most part is garbage.