Monetizing Freemium Products to Work for You
Magmic is a leading BlackBerry® app developer and publisher with mobile games such as Rubik’s® Cube, The New York Times® Crosswords, THKLive and Ka-Glom. Join us for rare insight how these products were developed, specifically looking at what business models were used on the BlackBerry platform.

Joshua Ostrowalker, CTO with Magmic
Ryan Henry, Engineering Lead with Magmic Games

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As a content creator, vendor, and publisher, Magmic Inc. is as versatile as they come in the mobile application development world. Founded in 2002, the Canadian firm develops its own original contentfor some of the top brands in gaming, media, and music. Looking forward, the company is focused on increasing its product portfolio for the BlackBerry® platform – a continuation of a long and successful partnership that has spanned nearly a decade.

Troy Johnson, Magmic’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, tells us about working with the BlackBerry® Advertising Service, BlackBerry® Messenger and the Research In Motion® (RIM®) Developer Relations team.

Tell us about your decision to employ the BlackBerry Advertising Service.
We started using BlackBerry Advertising Service in December 2010 with our game Ka-Glom! It was a free product, so we had a significant user base but no way to monetize it. After taking the APIs that were available, we integrated interstitial ads into the game. It was so successful that we committed to use the BlackBerry Advertising Service with another 19 products. We chose products that were good performers but not our top revenue generators, and decided to make them free and integrated with the BlackBerry Advertising Service. Free products have a much larger user base which we’re able to monetize using ads and by offering a purchasable ad-free product.

How important has the BlackBerry Advertising Service been in terms of revenue generation?
In this industry, it’s not easy to bring an ad-enabled product to a market, look at that ad revenue, and then decide to develop more. But that’s exactly what we’ve been able to do with the BlackBerry Advertising Service. Using the service doubles or triples the click-through rate we get with other ad services that deliver standard in-game banner ads. The BlackBerry Advertising Service has contributed significantly to our revenue and enables us to produce other products.

Magmic also has a large suite of paid apps. Why have you had so much success with paid BlackBerry smartphone apps compared with other platforms?
One of the strengths of BlackBerry is the security that we’re afforded when we launch a product. When we launch a product as a paid product on the BlackBerry platform, we’re confident that we’re going to maximize the potential. The marketing effort we’ve invested in and the ongoing marketing support provided by RIM greatly increase our chance of success. There isn’t a thriving industry of pirated BlackBerry content that would undermine our joint marketing effort.

How important has it been for Magmic to work closely with RIM?
Our partnership with RIM has been hugely important to our success for a couple of reasons. RIM has always helped us access the BlackBerry market by allowing us to participate in a number of marketing campaigns including the latest ones, such as BlackBerry® 7 and BlackBerry Messenger 6. We don’t have the same level of access to other markets, and there isn’t the same level of commitment from other OEMs to help content providers succeed. Whether it’s giving us pre-commercial devices to test or simply picking up the phone to get answers to our questions, RIM has been genuinely committed to our success for years. Our contact at RIM through the BlackBerry® Alliance Program has been an angel.

Thanks again for talking to us today, Troy! Be sure to visit Magmic’s site to learn more about this great app development company.

I am very proud to announce that the BlackBerry® Advertising Service SDK for BlackBerry® WebWorks™ is ready for its first public beta. This beta is designed to allow BlackBerry WebWorks developers to integrate an additional source of revenue into their applications.

The Advertising Service for BlackBerry WebWorks SDK can be used in your applications running on BlackBerry® 6 OS or higher. With this beta release you can start using the Advertising Service in your production apps – all you need is the BlackBerrry Webworks SDK, a few hours of development and a few lines of code and you will have access to a large and growing network of advertisers, all while dealing directly with just one trusted partner: Research In Motion® (RIM®).

As mentioned above, it only takes a few lines of code to add the Advertising Service to your BlackBerry WebWorks application. The application is designed so that all the work is handled by the library, so all you need to do is define your banner and place it on your screen! Here’s an example of how simple it can be:

<script type="text/javascript">
var zoneId = 12345; // Provided by RIM
var bannerObj = new blackberry.advertising.Banner(zoneId, "divId");
</script>

<div id="divId">
<!-- Banner ad will be displayed here -->
</div>

This will place a banner wherever you insert the <div> code, as seen in the above screenshot.

To get started, register with the BlackBerry Advertising Service to receive your registered copy of the BlackBerry Advertising Service beta SDK and a unique zone identifier to use in your application. Once you have the Advertising Service integrated and tested, submit it to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront to start earning revenue! Visit the BlackBerry Advertising Service forum for support, and file issues on our Issue Tracker.

For additional resources, you can check out the Developer’s Guide and Release Notes, and be sure to read up on the BlackBerry WebWorks API.