Tapjoy – Easy and effective monetization of virtual currency

Here is an article on MobileCrunch by Gagan Biyani how Tapjoy’s ease of use and effective with offers.

Tapjoy, the small development shop that brought us the incredible TapDefense for the iPhone [iTunes link], has quietly built out an extremely strong toolset to provide monetization options for app developers. Through two strong offerings, they claim to increase ad revenue for free apps by more than 250%. I first met them at the TechCrunch50 DemoPit, and was thoroughly impressed by the Tapjoy platform.

First, they aggregate ads from all the major mobile ad networks and serve the highest-paying ad for an app. This method leaves the developer with nigh an unfilled ad; Tapjoy boasts a 99.9% fill rate. Second, they enable developers to sell virtual goods within their apps (such as extra points in Mobster or extra towers in TapDefense) for real money. They do this by providing the user with the option to download an app in exchange for the virtual good. Be sure to read about this later on in the article, because it is truly the most innovative 3rd party platform I’ve seen on the iPhone all year.

First, the ad aggregation. Similar to AdWhirl (recently acquired by AdMob) and Mobclix, Tapjoy has a platform that combines ads from 10 mobile ad networks and provides your app with the one that has the highest PPC. And this platform is completely free for developers. In the nacent mobile advertising market, fill rate is crucial to developers, since the major ad networks are struggling to independently keep up with demand for advertising. Tapjoy, like AdWhirl and TechCrunch50 startup Mobclix, scours the networks for the highest paying ad and fills your ad with that advertisement. Meanwhile, they are collecting a gold mine of data about the habits of the users of the roughly 1,000 applications running the Tapjoy SDK. Co-Founder Lee Linden told me that ad networks like Tapjoy because they provide the networks with a large amount of data and increased fill rates. Furthermore, they work hard to build relationships with the networks – something that will serve them well in the long haul.

Continue reading the article on MobileCrunch : Has Tapjoy solved monetization of free apps on the iPhone and Android?

Here is a case study on how one iPhone app — gpsAssassin — used Offerpal & Tapjoy to monetize virtual currency: How the iphones next hit games makes money.