Three years ago Adknowledge paid $50 million to buy game monetizer Super Rewards. But then its founder bought it back and today sold it to user acquisition service Playerize. Super Rewards’ embeddable paywall for developers lets gamers score virtual goods and currency by buying offers, completing surveys, and watching branded videos.
Super Rewards will turn Playerize into a one-stop shops for devs who want to buy users and squeeze money out them while staying focused on making their games fun. But considering Playerize has raised only $1 million to date, this must have been a fire sale.
Jason Bailey co-founded Super Rewards back in 2007. Just 18 months of bootstrapping later it reached a $100 million yearly revenue run rate helping developers convert credit card-less kids and stingy adults into paying it customers. According to Playerize’s blog post, it seem the acquisition will fill a ton of holes in its business:
This deal adds thousands of customers. Millions of end users. More than a hundred thousand impression per hour. A solid and experienced team of eight people. A suite of mobile, social and stand alone MMO products to help monetization and game discovery. Thousands of advertiser relationships. Dozens of diverse payment options around the globe for mobile payments, prepaid game cards, localized credit cards, and bank payments. Historical analytics and data around user behaviour and virtual currency optimization.
But things got tough for Super Rewards over the last year as Facebook signed an exclusive deal with TrialPay to power its official offer wall and rewards system. We heard a lot of employees left Super Rewards after that and it had to retreat from part of its mobile offering. Maybe Playerize can make better use of it than Adknowledge. Still, the low price we expect for the sale could just be one more aftershock of Zynga’s dismal debut on the public market.