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Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.
While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated, with Facebook’s continued growth, there are no signs that this area will be slowing anytime soon. Interestingly enough, all of the ad network consolidation has been occurring primarily through Adknowledge who has acquired multiple ad networks in the past year including Cubics, Adknowledge, and Lookery’s ad serving business.
The size of this acquisition is reportedly $30 million although Adknowledge claims that this number is obviously inaccurate. With many ad networks in the Facebook ecosystem, Adknowledge will have to make a more acquisitions over the coming months if they plan to continue the strategy of growth through acquisition. Then again, the company now is pulling in more than $250 million a year in revenue which isn’t a bad place to be sitting.
That social platform advertising ecosystem continues to get more interesting by the day. If you learn more about it and meet the people that are building this ecosystem, you should attend this year’s Social Ad Summit where Super Rewards among many others will be presenting. What ad networks do you think will be next to be acquired?
The people at Super Rewards have poor customer service. I completed an offer for 250 business cards. They asked me to send the confirmation email for my purchase. Unfortunately I did not receive the confirmation from Vista Print for some reason. Instead I sent to them the following: a copy/paste of my online receipt from the Vista Print web site, a bank statement showing my payment to Vista Print, a Pay Pal receipt showing my payment. I gave them the phone # of Vista Print and order number and asked them to call - they didn’t. And today I actually sent them a picture of my cards I received and the box that contains them. This was not enough proof for the people at Super Rewards and I have been denied 57 imaginary Yoville dollars. They claim the advertiser did not receive my order, despite the fact I have sent them a photo of the cards I purchased. I will no longer support any of their listed offers as a result of the treatment I received from Super Rewards.