Kongregate shares a case study on monetizing browser-based online games

Kongregate, which operates a web site for indie games, is announcing today it has had good success with its app platform for browser-based games. What’s more, it’s sharing some metrics so that it can show potential developers how it can make them money.
The San Francisco-based company launched its Konduit Application Platform in December. The idea was to take sophisticated indie games, such as massively multiplayer online games, and give them monetization and social sharing benefits, even though they are not readily playable on the most popular social networks. That is, the platform lets game developers launch games on the Kongregate web site which have all of the features of games launched on big social networks such as Facebook.
Today, Kongregate is announcing that Dream World, a multiplayer online role-playing game, has had considerable success using Kongregate’s platform to reach audiences. The game was built by Playmage, a company started by former Electronic Arts executive William Ren.
In one week, Ren ported the game to the Kongregate.com web site using the Konduit Application Platform, which lets developers monetize a free-to-play game through virtual currency purchases. In its first two weeks, the browser-based game has been played a million times. The game had an effective CPM, or cost per mil, a measure of advertising revenue, of $20. And average revenue per paying user was $26.
Those are pretty good statistics. Playmage used Kongregate’s achievement system, which makes a game more social with leaderboards and trophies, to drive hundreds of thousands of players to play the game.
Kongregate is also announcing today it has added several new payment partners that can make it easier for gamers to pay. It is adding Zong, which enables mobile payments, Offerpal, which enables special offers that users can fulfill to avoid making payments, and the Ultimate Game Card, a prepaid card that users can buy at stores if they don’t have credit cards to pay for online games. Kongregate is also adding European partners later this month, including the PlaySafe retail card and PayByCash payment options.
Kongregate now has more than 20,000 indie games that are played more than a million times a day. The company was founded in 2006 by Greer and his sister Emily Greer. It has 15 employees. Rivals include sites such as New Grounds and Addicting Games. Investors include Greylock Partners, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, Excite co-founder Joe Kraus, investor Jeff Clavier, and Richard Wolpert, former president of Disney Online. The company has raised $9 million to date.