If you haven’t heard much about RockYou yet, you probably will be hearing more soon.
Part operator of social games, part advertising network, RockYou doesn’t sit still. Now it has announced its acquisition of mobile ad network PlayHaven from former parent company Science.
“The acquisition of PlayHaven, which has bounced around a bit, shows how RockYou is accelerating its push into mobile gaming and transforming itself into a new kind of business, as much about advertising and media as it is about gaming,” notes Venture Beat Magazine (VBM).
The San Fran-headquartered RockYou is experiencing a turnaround led by chief executive Lisa Marino.
This is very strategic for the company, as we got very big in online and in 2015 we are making a very big push into mobile, Marino said in an interview with GamesBeat before the speech. Our acquisition pipeline for 2015 is exclusively mobile.
RockYou, however, still specializes in making money from advertising and other monetization from social games on the web.
Our goal is to repeat what we did in the online world with mobile, Marino said. We didnt have the tech or publisher relationships to start that from scratch. This is a big catalyst and game changer for us.
Marino sees the company as — among other things — a great “aggregator of audiences.”
We have become a preeminent aggregator of audiences around the world, said Marino. PlayHaven is a great foundation for us to build on, and for our mobile games like Kitchen Scramble and Words of Wonder, as well as future games well announce soon. We also look forward to connecting PlayHavens network to our private market of video ads from Fortune 1000 companies.
Once PlayHaven is fully integrated into its business, RockYou’s mobile slice should rise to 30 percent.
