As we noted the past two years in our GameDaily BIZ Ad Watch: Year in Review columns, in-game advertising is a mushrooming market. Last year in particular, it became increasingly apparent that the casual gaming industry was benefiting from advertiser support, especially for web based games. At the same time, because of the overlap between the casual and mobile markets, games on mobile phones were also getting a boost [Where you at? - Ed.] from in and around-game ads.

Given the success of the casual gaming field both in the PC sector and with mobile phones, it was only going to be so long until the two fields converged. One of the first such offerings came from Greystripe and Opera's mobile browser. While the alliance between the two companies is still very young, it's already turned up great results, and the partnership will no doubt bear more fruit going forward.

We chatted with Tatasuki Tomita, SVP consumer products for Opera, and Michael Chang, CEO of Greystripe, to discuss their beneficial collaboration.

Over 1.6 million Opera users served
Opera and GreyStripe have only been working together since December 2007. Still, the two announced that Opera users have downloaded over 1.6 million mobile games and applications from Greystripe during the first month of collaboration. In response to this, the Opera Mini homepage now has a bookmark added for GameJump, Greystripe's free mobile game portal.

"Executing on our partnership program has been defined by our top tier partners," commented Chang. "The reasons why we sought out Opera are that their [software is] easy to use and they're a great partner because their users are very synergistic and frequent downloaders. So we sought Opera out at first and the synergies we had were pretty obvious from the initial discussions."

"The nice thing about the partnership is that it's a long-term relationship with the bookmark," Chang continued. "It taps into every user of the Opera Mini browser, and I think the other key point is that traffic is definitely growing week over week, and is also supplementing the statistical points; Opera users are among the top three in actually playing the game for a long time after downloading. That speaks well to the quality of the business model."

"Opera's browser line is targeted toward gamers. Opera Mini has had a nice response to Greystripe's offerings, because they're used to downloading applications," added Tomita. "We have more than 30 million Opera Mini activations so far and Opera is bringing in more users to GameJump."

Encores for Greystripe/Opera
Because the collaboration between Opera and Greystripe has been so successful in a short period, the two companies are already looking for certain ways to expand their partnership. While Opera signing up as part of Greystripe's partnership program is great, they feel that both companies have a lot to offer each other beyond their inherently complementary nature. They expect that the Opera Mini bookmark for GameJump will only be the beginning; Greystripe already has started offering downloads of the PC Opera browser on its website as well.

"All the things we're doing right now we're happy with," said Chang, "Not to throw out something we haven't officially announced, but there are distribution things we can do; making the Opera browser available through our distribution partners is a big one. A lot of distribution partners want better content and Opera is a great addition. Not only do they want to generate content, they want stickiness to their site, and distributing Opera, which is a complement to our network of distribution partners, makes sense with regards to that."