Thanks, Ian. That was a fine job. You elicited information useful to new investors and also to old hands. I’ve listed below some of the points I found most interesting.
GAMES AND MONETIZATION
-- I was really interested to hear that they have some evidence of how games may monetize in Brazil. In one of the earlier conference calls, John Abbott commented that they’d seen monetization the U.S., Asia, and Europe, but were not sure how it would go in Latin America.
Per Charles’ post on January 5, there were a little over 9 million SnapMeUp sign-ups. Applying the numbers to that:
9,000,000 Sign-ups
30.0% % that become active
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2,700,000 Active users
1.5% % that become paying users
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40,500 Paying users
$ 10 Average spent per month
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$ 405,000 Income per month
-- Also interesting that they are using a somewhat different model from Facebook for third-party games: allowing developers to not only use the Quepasa currency, but Quepasa will also actively market the games to earn a larger rev share.
-- The information about Facebook’s experience in having the games be a major driver of traffic to the site.
-- It’s hard not to be a little concerned about the extent of QPSA’s new focus on becoming a game developer, but on the other hand, what should they do? Sit there, and let others rake in the profits? Especially if Latino-centric games are in short supply at this point and the market is there waiting to be served. He did comment that early-on they needed to have a single-minded focus on acquiring registered members (“…as I mentioned earlier, our approach has been pretty systematic in first focusing on the user acquisition side. And we had really to be single-minded about doing that…). This implies to me that they are very aware of the danger of losing focus, and think that now they can widen their focus without losing focus.
-- So we should be seeing Satisfashion in January, and maybe it’s Coffee Central coming in February.
DSM
A new automobile campaign in Mexico tied on-air to Quepasa’s DSM. That should be interesting. DSM itself as a way to drive new users to the site.
MOBILE
So they’ve taken their first step in mobile with Papacito on Qualcom Plaza on American Movil. Sounds good. I wonder how many apps are on Qualcom Plaza…
Thanks again.
