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In The Beginning...
...The Problem
The Eureka Moment... One day, one of those 22,000 developers called the offices of WirelessDeveloper, got Konny on the line and said "hey, I've joined lots of your developer programs and you guys are really great. But, could I just pay you guys some money have you DO this for me? In other words, instead of teaching me how to do it myself -- can you just do it for me?" And to make a long story short, that's the day that WirelessDeveloper became the WirelessDeveloper Agency. As the market for mobile games began to form, the Agency began brokering business all up and down the eco-system. Small developers were creating games and publishers were taking them to market through their carrier relationships. The carriers owned the storefronts and they controlled nearly all of the mobile commerce. Some publishers decided they could make even more money if they acted more like distributors, than publishers. So instead of making all of their own products, they began looking for finished products and they turned to the Agency for that. Every day we took games from Europe and packaged them for sale in the US. The distributors paid an advance against a revenue share of future sales and the Agency managed all of the paperwork in both directions. Volumes grew and as more advanced phones hit the market, the demand grew that much further. The carriers needed differentiation and wanted more games to lure customers. There were decks of Applications, but they did not sell. It was an incredibly sleepy business. It was all about games. Greed
More and more, the Agency noticed little problems popping up in the deals. The distributors started getting greedy. They were putting more pressure on the developers; fancier products for less advance money and lower revenue shares. But then, came the really bad stuff. Distributors put out a call for two boxing games. The Agency found two great games and presented them. The distributor took both on a revenue share. A few months later, we learned that the two games had been declined, but alas, a boxing game was on deck. But that boxing game was commissioned directly by the distributor for cash. So what really happened? The distributor accepted titles that it had no intention of distributing in order to block their market entry and increase the products of their own title. How do we know this? More atrocities, bad deals, shady under-handed stuff. The business started getting ugly. Games were listed as rejected by the carrier but were found to have never been shown to the carrier. Revenue-shares mis-reported. Not Reported. Lost. Forgotten. In one case, the distributor used the royalties in trust to make their own payroll. WDA cleans up the market With the distributors completely out-of-control and the entire industry becoming a black market, the WirelessDeveloper Agency (now WDA), decided to undertake a bold step and approach the carriers directly to report the problems. They were astounded. They had no idea. So WDA decided that it could be a better distributor than any of the others in the marketplace by doing a whole lot of things differently. First, market visibility (provide developers direct visibilty into the "secret" process). Second, set one industry-wide revenue share for distribution, and set it at 15%. (At the time, the entire market was at 50% and moving to 65%. In other words, the developer would get 35% and the distributor would get 65%, and the carrier was paying about 60% of retail. ) Suddenly, with WDA, the developers TRIPLED their net revenue! WDA also rid of all the double-dealing and tricks. We got rid of "application slamming", a practice whereby a distributor would pretend to not remember that a title was rejected but deliver it anyway, and slip it onto the deck, lost in a sea of unmanaged processes. Finally, the market was cleaned up. By 2007, the mobile games business is booming. There are finally color handsets and their performance is decent. The carriers are the market-makers. No one makes money unless they are distributing their mobile content through the carriers. WDA has now expanded its distribution footprint to every major operator in the United States and Canada. The others either go out of business or change their business model and become publishers. WDA expands further by distributing music, wallpapers, videos and more and becomes the predominant mobile content distributor in the USA. In 2009, the world is rocked by the iPhone release. All at once, there is a call for "open markets" for mobile content. The once sleepy apps business comes alive and suddenly everyone enters the marketplace. The iPhone single-handedly reinvents the mobile apps business globally. Suddenly, there is a new problem. Too much content and too little shelfspace. The market leader (Apple) is emulated by multiple handset vendors and independents, all waiving the "open" flag, all fragmenting the market further. The consumers scatter and publishers find themselves managing multiple distribution points, none of them quite performing to a level they'd like. WDA, Again!
In early 2009, WDA began quietly experimenting with mobile marketing campaigns designed to sell games, applications, video and services. Falling on the heels of multiple large-scale commercial marketing failures by various publishers, WDA used a series of sophisticated analytics and a handful of bold experiments to prove it was possible to apply marketing techniques to sell mobile content, profitably! One success led to another until now, in 2010, WDA is the leading mobile app marketer in the business. WDA has expanded again to sell other forms of content (like mobile television) and execute ad-sponsored campaigns involving free content downloads. Today, WDA is still the Wireless Developer Agency. We are still focused on supporting the ecosystem of mobile content, and we keep innovating to serve our clients and the community as a whole. |
