HeyZap, The Longtail Competitor To Oberon Media

• If you haven’t heard of Oberon Media, I’m sure you’ve played a casual game or two on one of the many sites that they power. Since their inception, Oberon has become the king of casual games, providing partners like MSN, MySpace, MTV, Walmart.com, NBC and more with their game player.
• Enter Heyzap, the latest product launch out of the Y Combinator college of startups. Founded by serial entrepreneurs, and my friends, Immad Akhund (recently sold Clickpass) and Jude Gomila, HeyZap is to become the longtail competitor to Oberon by creating an easily embeddable casual games player for use by any website or blog. Webmasters now have the ability to offer their users 4000+ casual games with a simple strip of code.
• Immad says “Currently, publishers don’t have easy access to highly addictive, online casual games content, but HeyZap intends to change this. Heyzap will shift where users play casual games and bring casual games to a larger audience”. The player aggregates and filters casual games from major game portals, game developers and Mochi Media, recommending users with the most popular games titles in their favorite categories.
• Some of the benefits to adding HeyZap to a site or blog include increasing user engagement, such as higher on-site time and potentially more page-views.
• The platform also hopes to help promote new game developers who aren’t getting exposure on the major networks, offering them ad-revenue shares and a home for their games.
• Casual gaming is now a $2.2bn market, predicted to grow at 25% this year. With the success of Oberon Media, HeyZap stands a real chance in the market for providing game tools for the rest of us. Somebody like DemandMedia, who offers tools for publishers could be setting their eye on this company very soon (Acquisition maybe?) Stay tuned….

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