In this weeks App Marketing Conversations; Ryan Morel of GameHouse, Robi Ganguly of Apptentive and Ian Sefferman of MobileDevHQ (by Tune) discuss MobileDevHQ’s recent acquisition by Tune (formerly HasOffers), Flurry’s acquisition by Yahoo and where other consolidation opportunities exist. Watch the video here, or read the transcript below!

Ryan Morel: Good morning and welcome to another edition of App Marketing Conversations. I am Ryan Morel with GameHouse. As always, I’m here with Ian Sefferman of MobileDevHQ and Robi Ganguly of Apptentive. In this segment we’re going to talk a little bit about consolidation in the mobile app market and I hesitated when I said MobileDevHQ because that’s no longer who you’re apart of.

Ian Sefferman: That’s true.

Ryan Morel: So it has been announced, but we will announce it officially on an upcoming Conversations that Ian and MobileDevHQ has be acquired Tune, which is formally known as HasOffers.

Ian Sefferman: Indeed. Indeed. So we are currently now MobileDevHQ by Tune.

Ryan Morel: Okay.

Ian Sefferman: That’s exciting.

Ryan Morel: And part of the, there’s the HasOffers by Tune . . .

Ian Sefferman: There is.

Ryan Morel: . . . and Mobile App Tracking by Tune. You’re the third leg of the stool I guess.

Ian Sefferman: That’s right. So I think it’s going to be a great acquisition and combination of the two companies. So there’s HasOffers which works on, the four word sentence that I use is Roll your own app network, and then mobile app tracking helps with attribution analytics on mobile apps and then MobileDevHQ does sort of ASO and Organic.

So MAT is a lot of paid and we’re a lot of organic. Put those two together and you have a really interesting understanding of how your top of your funnel is working.

Ryan Morel: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So it might be helpful for some of the people watching to, if you can talk about it, maybe some of the mechanics of the process you went through. That might be interesting to people.

Ian Sefferman: Yeah. So it was really interesting. We did an integration with MAT in April or so, and that integration was really an understanding that some of the data that MAT had combined with a bunch of the data that we had could be put together in a way that produced even more interesting data. In real life, what that came down to was we could actually start to estimate the number of downloads that a particular keyword would give you, rather than just where do you rank for a particular keyword. And I think that integration was, we expected it to be a good feature. I think it was more successful than we ever thought it would be for both of us. And that sort of lead to a bunch of customers coming to both of us and then we realized that there’s a whole bunch more that we could do together. And then we just sort of ran with it and it became clear that the opportunities were really large for both of us and we could make it work, so we did.

Ryan Morel: Yeah. Cool. So as part of the overall, broader theme of this conversation around consolidation, congratulations to you guys. It’s fantastic and it sounds like it will lead to beneficial tools and services for both of your customers.

Ian Sefferman: I hope so.

Ryan Morel: So another company that just got acquired was Flurry. It’s been about three or four weeks since that happened, with rumors that it got acquired by Yahoo, rumors in the $200 to $300 million range. What was your initial reaction to that acquisition?

Robi Ganguly: I think the first one was that it sounded like a fire sale. It sounded like, a year or so ago Flurry was talking about being a billion dollar company and everything was going gangbusters and app installs were a huge business. And then they sold for $200 or $300 million. I was like, ‘Wait, what happened?’ That was my first reaction. What was yours?

Ryan Morel: Yeah, the same.

Ian Sefferman:

Okay.

Ryan Morel: Because you’re like, and we’ve all heard stories, right, like that things weren’t quite going as well as people said and maybe Facebook had a bigger impact on their business than other people.

Robi Ganguly: Right, right.

Ryan Morel: Yeah, it seemed, I thought it was unfortunate, especially for the rest of the people that were still independent and compared to what AdColony apparently got from Opera.

Ian Sefferman: I think one of the interesting questions to me, I don’t have the answer to it in any way, maybe you guys will have some insight into it, is, to me you have to separate Flurry out into two distinct sets. Right? There’s Flurry the analytics company that provides a whole bunch of really interesting things for free. Then there’s Flurry the ad business that uses some of those analytics to help target and things like that, and this is where they make their money. And it always at least felt like, and I don’t know if this is true, that the analytics piece was continuing to do pretty well. People were still using them whereas the ad business was the one that got sort of killed by Facebook and others. Do you guys agree with that?

Robi Ganguly: That’s what it sounds like. It sounds like the upswing in their revenue trajectory was when they rolled out app install ads. That’s when I started hearing more and more, like, ‘Oh, they’re doing really well. They’re adding another team, etc.’ And then when Facebook app install ads came out and turned out to be very successful, very affordable and effective at scale, I think that’s when their business got impacted.

Ryan Morel: Yeah. And I would wonder how much, because Flurry is kind of a lower-end analytics tool, right? The really big publishers are not using Flurry so Yahoo got of data at scale about users, probably, but not necessarily like publisher or advertiser relationships.

Ian Sefferman: Right, right.

Ryan Morel: So generally speaking, how do you feel about consolidation in the market over the next six to 12 months and any predictions about what niches or areas of the market are ripe for consolidation?

Robi Ganguly: Well, I think that if you’re an analytics company, if you’re like a data collector in some meaningful way, you’re probably out there talking to people about what consolidation looks like because you now see Yahoo has a big player on that, Facebook has a big player, right. So they bought Navo a little while ago. They’ve got Parse. So they’ve got a bunch of touch points. Google, clearly, throughy Ad Mob and Android has a bunch of touch points. Apple appears to be doing more. So if you’re in the data insights, analytics space you’re looking at fewer and fewer options. You’re probably having a lot of conversations. That’s where I would expect to see a few more things happening.

Ian Sefferman: I think we’re just at the beginning of this trend and we have a long way to go. The ecosystem is starting to mature. Tools are getting better. I think rolling this conversation back into a marketer’s frame of mind, it’s like, we’re going to be producing some winners and we’re going to be producing some winners for the marketers, and ultimately that’s going to be a good thing, I think. And if there are outcomes I think the other sort of second order impact is that if there are significant outcomes for people, there will continue to be investment in the category, and ultimately that’s going to drive more and better tools for the marketers.

Ryan Morel: That’s a really good point. Okay. Anything else you guys want to add?

Robi Ganguly: Again, congrats to the Tune and MobileDevHQ team. I think that the, and we didn’t talk about this, but our customers have said for a while that you guys sort of made sense together and once you started integrating that was great. So I think that’s going to be awesome for marketers who are using your tools.

Ian Sefferman: Awesome. Thanks.

Ryan Morel: You’re going to have to get new t-shirts made that say ‘MobileDevHQ by Tune.’

Ian Sefferman: I know. I know. Exactly.

Ryan Morel: Okay. Thanks very much for watching. Make sure to ‘Like’ this video. Subscribe to our channel and check out the other segments from Ian and Robi.

 

By Ryan Morel