Matmi would like to announce that they were a finalist for the IMA awards last night. We were the only advergame agency up for any award. We did not win, but getting the finalist award is pretty good. Congratulations to the ‘Transport for London Cycling Safety’ campaign that won, I wonder how viral this campaign actually was?
Unfortunately Matmi did not make the award ceremony as we had prior commitments, we are also up for a Dadi awards tonight in Leeds for our ‘Ho Ho Ho Yellow Snow’ Christmas campaign (the fastest moving viral of all time in one day). I will not be going to the Dadi awards as I am off to two Halloween parties instead (think I will go as a zombie tramp, that way I won’t have to dress up). I will be sending our PR guru Penny instead.

I think were in for a good chance of winning this one. We could do with another trophy for the cabinet

It took a while, much sweat and tears. I am proud to announce that Matmi has finally made it into the top 100,000 (according to Alexa) sites in the world.
It might not sound a big deal, but it really is. We are in the top 9,000 busiest sites in the UK.

Obviously there are many sites that are busier than us, but they are not company websites, usually they are much more resources such as news, videos and email etc.
It seems that we are one of the busiest digital agencies in the world. We are busier than all the other viral agencies and digital agencies in the UK.

Our position proves our excellent online marketing expertise. Most of our traffic comes from the advergames and viral campaigns we produce and the fact our website is a pleasurable experience for our users. As they say the proof is in the pudding.

For you technical geeks out there we now have a page rank of 6, this is also better than most of our competitors.

Last Christmas when we released our game ‘Ho Ho Ho Yellow Snow’ we were the 5000 busiest site in the world for a few days. The game only took us two weeks to produce.

So if you want lots of targeted traffic to your website, call Matmi and we will inject some of our magic into your campaign.

Many of us like to play games. The gaming world now makes more money than Hollywood.

Many years ago we started to make games for ourselves as we liked to spread a little joy and it was great for our own promotion. These games were classed as ‘viral games’, simply because they often went viral. Our first game Monster Poolside Sumo was played more than 5 million times in one month. It was one of the first games on Miniclip.

We knew that this new ‘viral gaming’ would catch on. We started making games for brands and they started to spread virally. This is what we always wanted to do, knowing that we are bringing joy by entertaining the public and getting paid for it, made us a happy company.

At first getting our games out there was easy, really easy. We just posted it on a few sites, sent it to a few friends and hey presto an enormous success. They were not that many games around and the novelty was still fresh.

As the years have gone by many more gaming sites have been born. Its seems that everyone wanted to own an online Arcade, they all probably wanted to be the next Miniclip (with good reason).

Thousands of these sites have sprung up all over the web in every conceivable language. Many of these sites have become very popular, often more popular than many of the biggest names on the web. These sites target specific demographics, there are sites aimed at girls, boys, young un’s, men, women and even silver surfers (oldies).

Matmi have been building a seeding database over these years which is now probably the most advanced seeding database in existence. It features all the sites where we can promote our games.

At the same time all this was happening, many traditional magazines and traditional media companies were losing much of their audience to the online space. This obviously affected their ad revenue which has been constantly diminishing.

It was a matter of time before these companies decided to get a slice of the online pie, most of them have not done this organically, instead they have been on a spending spree buying many of the game sites and entertainment portals. Many of them have spent millions acquiring these sites. Club Penguin (kids MMOG) sold to Disney for $700 million, Mousebreaker (UK game and video site) was sold to IPC (magazine publisher) for a seven figure sum and Venture Capitalists have injected many millions into entertainment portals.

The problem with this is that these companies now have to get a return on their investment, traditional banner adverts do not work as well as they did so they have decided to charge those people who gave them the games that made the sites busy in the first place. They are trying to force their old method of working onto the new online world. Now many of these game sites want to charge us to put our advergames onto their sites. We knew ages ago that this would happen and understand that people need to make money, but what we did not realise is that they would try and introduce a ‘pay per play’ method.

The problem with ‘pay per play’ is that it ruins the creative freedom and imagination of agencies like Matmi. It means that if we make a really popular game we will end up paying through the nose for its success. On the other hand, those making crap advergames will still get a lot of traffic even though they don’t deserve it. Users end up engaging with brands through a bad experience which is no good for anyone.

Some of these companies want to charge up to 15p per play. So if our game went on their site and had 300,000 plays we would have to pay an extra £45,000. When a game costs a client anywhere from £15,000 an extra £45,000 bill is not what they want.

There are many losers with this ‘pay per play’ method, firstly the consumer, as the games that are forced upon them is because the amount of money paid to the site, not the quality of the game, the other loser is the clients who have the games made because they will have to invest more money for seeding purposes.

We do not oppose paying for seeding, sometimes its the best way to get very targeted traffic plus the game sites need to make some decent money. However we think charging a flat fee for a guaranteed time period is a fairer method for us, the end user and our clients. Or if they insist on the ‘pay per play’ it must be capped.

These companies need to realise that their old methods of charging will not and cannot work in this industry.

The problem we have now is that many big traditional ad agencies are jumping onto our wagon but often are producing pretty crap games and using the ‘pay per play’ method to guarantee user numbers. Some of these companies often pay more than £50,000 for seeding. This is simply ridiculous. None of these agencies that pay this much have ever got the amount of targeted traffic that we have by using our organic seeding methods. Soon the big agencies will realise that they are often paying over the odds.

So I have a warning on three accounts.

Firstly to the end users, the game players – these new methods of pay per play are going to make the quality of the games unimportant, you are going to end up with overly branded crap games on many of your favourite sites.

Secondly the clients – Using ‘pay per play’ method you are going to pay a lot more when having a game produced and actually getting a lot less.

Thirdly the ‘pay per play’ gaming sites (portals etc) – your new ‘pay per play’ model will result in less quality games and many game producers who used to give you non branded games for free will be aware of your charging mechanism and will want a slice of the pie. Whilst this is happening other sites with no ‘pay per play’ will get the quality content, which will result in them becoming the most popular sites because as we all know ‘Content is King’.

So what happens next? Many of the big game producers, digital engagement agencies and viral agencies are now working together producing the game / entertainment portals of the future. Their combined knowledge of games, game sites and promotion puts them in a great position to have the busiest sites of tomorrow.

Matmi will carry on making great games as we always have, we will still promote them in the same way using our advanced seeding database. We will pay for seeding when we think it is needed and we will carry on discussions with many of the big game portals to work out a deal that we are all happy with and a method that does not ruin the industry that we live and love.

So I invite you all you have a debate about this, please add your comments below.

It took quite a bit longer than we first imagined, but our new Matmi website was finally launched this week. After 2 and a half months of discussions, designing, coding and banging our heads against a brick wall, we said a tearful farewell to our beloved Matmi monkeys and replaced the old run-down, out of date site with an all singing, all dancing cutting edge web experience.

We’re really proud of the new design. Not only is it colourful and very reflective in what Matmi can do these days, but it has a very strong content management system which makes it so much easier to update the site in the future. All you technical geeks out there may like to know a little more about the web structure: an OOP PHP-based site, abiding to the laws of w3C validation (XHTML strict in most cases), with a dynamic Flash AS3 banner that streams FLV videos. And for the non-technical geeks, well…its very colourful and fun to look at.

My favourite feature is the dynamic banner (which we call the Matmi Lid). For those of you who haven’t yet played around with it, try clicking on the lever to the left hand side. There’s a few little extras in there. Something you may not have noticed are the random heads that can be found just above the Matmi Lid (pull the lever down to reveal a different head each time). You may ask “why?”, you may think “eh?”…well basically we wanted to put something in the site that has inspired us. Each “head” you see represents a character from a TV show or a film. We think it’ll give you more of an understanding of how Matmi think and what we like.

 You will no doubt notice the Space Invaders game in the lid (pull the lever up to reveal it). Over the coming months more classic games will randomly appear in there, just to keep you entertained. We love retro games!

The snapshot section is pretty neat too. It will keep you up-to-date with some of the work we are currently doing. Also its a nice way to show you some of the work that is never officially used in our projects. We have a whole server full of graphics and animations that we did just for fun and it’s nice to finally be able to show you some of them.

The blog has also had a make-over to match the new site. We hope you find it a bit more insteresting and we promise we will try hard to keep the news up-to-date.

Keep an eye on our new friends section. this is still in progress. It’s something a little bit different but we think you’ll like it.

We’ve got plenty more games and projects on the way so keep an eye out for all the latest and greatest at Matmi. And if you get a spare second check out our portfolio and have a read through the rest of our new site. As always we’d love to hear your feedback. You can either comment in this blog, send us an email or fill out our online form at www.matmi.com/contact.php