Is Brett Brewer, president of Adknowledge and co-founder of Intermix Media, MySpace’s parent before it was sold for $673m to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in October 2005, onto something else big?
Adknowledge, which claims to be the largest independent advertising network, has acquired KITN Media, owner of Super Rewards which provides the virtual currency platform for casual games on social networks such as Facebook and yes, MySpace.
Super Rewards enables developers of social applications and online games to offer virtual currency to consumers who sign up for advertising offers. Consumers in turn redeem the currency for virtual goods or other services in more than 1,000 social games, including five out of the six largest virtual currency applications on Facebook
For example it provides the virtual currency platform behind the hugely popular Mob Wars and YoVille games applications.
Scott Lynn, Adnowledge’s chief executive, believes this form of advertising, which is considerably more lucrative than simple display or banner ads, is the next frontier in the fast evolving online advertising market. He thinks social networks like Facebook and MySpace, which generate billions of page views per day, are where the biggest opportunities are.“The challenge to date has been how to monetise all those eyeballs,” he says.
Lynn and Brewer believe Super Rewards could have the answer.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but this is the sixth acquisition and the largest to date for the 5-year-old Adknowledge which currently serves up 25bn online banner ads per month and generates $250m plus in annual ad revenues.
