This website is one year old today. (It also happens to be my wedding anniversary: March 16th is double red-ringed in the Long family calendar.)
To celebrate twelve months of mobile games industry scoops, interviews, analysis and insights, let’s have a look at how we’re doing, and what some top execs think of it all.
There’s also more on how you can help this site grow – the short answer is: advertise.
Why launch a site for the mobile games industry?
I worked at Apple as an App Store editor for years, and always wanted to read quality, no-fluff reporting on this turbulent, hyper-competitive and ever-changing slice of the games business.
Despite its scale, importance and influence, the mobile games market remains widely misunderstood, and covered patchily by existing media. I get why – it is big, complicated and pretty messy. You need someone who really gets it to do the reporting.
So in short: no-one else seemed to be doing it, so I did it.
How’s it going?
Pretty good – all the graphs are pointing up:
See if you can spot where the viral John Riccitiello “fucking idiots” story was published.
As a new site, it takes a while to build an audience, and more importantly be found by that audience. Until around late September, this site was pretty hard to find unless you were following me on Twitter or LinkedIn. (And remember, I was hidden away within Apple for over seven years and had no social media presence when I started all this.)
Once Google search started noticing us, things really took off. Last month this site was visited by over 36k readers, a record outside of that viral story from July 2022. And even though we’re only halfway through March, we’ve already beaten October 2022’s total.
Worth noting here that while search is important, SEO is not the name of the game with industry-facing media – it’s about building a quality audience organically, not juicing the numbers artificially.
There’s also the newsletter. Again, before I launched this site I just wanted one concise email that contains everything I need to know from the last week, without any fluff, so that’s what the newsletter is. It goes out every Friday, and has just passed 2.5k subscribers. There’s always a little bit of exclusive commentary or behind the scenes stuff in there every week, too.
Who’s reading?
Founders, CEOs and other senior members of the mobile game development, investing, marketing and data industries.
A peek at my LinkedIn following shows you the level of seniority:
Besides breaking a story and watching the numbers go up, the best part of running mobilegamer.biz is meeting people.
Games people are really nice. And some important games people have been incredibly supportive of this site over the last year. Below, some – but not all – of those people have been generous enough to offer their personal seal of approval.
Testimonials
“Within a few months of launch mobilegamer.biz became my go-to source for industry news. In an age of endless twitter punditry and copy-paste journalism Neil’s instinctive filter for what’s worth paying attention to in the world of mobile games has proven invaluable.”
Simon Hade, Space Ape cofounder
“If you are looking for independent, original and authentic press, mobilegamer.biz is your go-to news site. Neil is following the industry hands-on, reporting the breaking news in all transparency and drawing on his unique background as editor. The content is always fresh, snackable and insightful for executives in the gaming industry.”
Eren Gökgür, Google apps and gaming partnerships
“Mobilegamer.biz is quickly emerging as a source of super high quality commentary, insightful analysis and relevant news. I recommend it to all my friends and colleagues.”
Akin Babayigit, Tripledot Studios cofounder & COO
“Mobilegamer.biz is the new reference point to be up to date on the mobile gaming market.”
Felipe Mata, FunPlus Barcelona lead
“Mobilegamer.biz is essential, informative reading. It has frequent scoops and really relevant angles and insights on industry-specific issues that other sources don’t find or have the experience to be able to surface.”
Neil McFarland, First Light Games co-CEO
“Mobilegamer.biz has easily the most trustworthy content in mobile.”
Arseny Lebedev, Original Games cofounder and CEO
How to support mobilegamer.biz
Advertise. If you like what this site does and want to get in front of a smart, creative and very senior mobile games industry audience, consider advertising.
You can buy banners on the homepage, sidebar and sponsor the newsletter. You can also partner on regular, relevant content columns: for example, Game Jobs Direct sponsors the Jobs Weekly column. This is useful, relevant editorial that people want to read with the right sponsor, and that’s why the partnership works. Any sponsorship will always be clearly called out at the top of that story.
Potential sponsorship opportunities coming up include the mobilegamer.biz podcast and two new regular weekly columns on data and marketing.
If any of that sounds interesting, drop me a line on neil@mobilegamer.biz. I’ll be at GDC Tuesday-Friday next week if you want to meet and discuss in person.
Important: I do not sell editorial and I do not write puff pieces for advertisers. Everything you read on this site is legit and written and edited by me.
Finally: thank you for reading this site. If you like what we’re building, tell your peers and subscribe to the newsletter. Onwards!
