When I joined Spill Group just over two years ago to set up their business in Asia, it was still a relatively small Dutch company. I had actually never heard of the company before Reinout te Brake contacted me, and also could not find a lot of information on the internet about Spill. Fast forward 26 months and things are completely different. Spill is now a VC invested company with over 130 employees, offices in Holland, Poland and China, and with leading online flash game websites all over the world. In terms of reach the company is in the top-3 of the online webgames world, together with Yahoo Games and MSN Games, with over 60 million unique visitors per month. If Microsoft and Yahoo do not merge Spill Group will be the number one very soon. I am proud to be part of this company, and hope to be able to continue to add to its success in the coming years.
This week at the Casual Connect convention in Amsterdam, Spill Group announced three new cooperations that shows the direction the company is going. First of all Spill Group announced that it decided to work with in-game advertising agency Double Fusion for both gamesgames.com and girlsgogames.com. Spill looked at several in-game advertising companies, but decided to work with Double Fusion because of its innovative solutions and end-to-end solution. This is a significant step, because it shows that Spill is now focusing more on the US market after already dominating many of the European markets.
Another big step for Spill was the announcement of RealNetworks that they have signed a long-term cooperation agreement with Spill Group. The cooperation will give Real exclusive syndication rights for Spill Group’s family-oriented portals. This means that Real’s games will be totally integrated into Spill’s portals, giving them a much bigger reach then before.
Third, Spill just announced that it has given Panfu, a recently launched and very fast growing virtual world for kids, the exclusive syndication rights for the kids sections of Spill Group’s portals in several European countries. These last two deals show the importance of having high game traffic on portals, and Spill’s role as the world’s number one game traffic generator, which is the core of Spill Group’s business model. I am sure you will hear a lot more about Spill Group in the next months and years, not only in Europe and the US, but also in Asia.