4 ms·

I've never had much success with this. Can anyone who has comment on how they approach the blogs? Maybe even a copy of a successful email sent to the bloggers

I've never had much success with this. Can anyone who has comment on how they approach the blogs? Maybe even a copy of a successful email sent to the bloggers?

jdrock 17y ago
Hi, I recently read your article entitled "Where's the Money in Casual Web Game Development?". Our firm, Plura Processing, provides a really easy way for online games to make money through grid computing. If a game developer embeds Plura on his site, we will pay him up to $2600/month for every 1000 concurrent users. This revenue source is a completely new and incremental source of money for game sites, which means it does not have to replace other revenue sources, like advertising. We entered beta a few months ago and currently have a handful of online games as affiliates, including the game you highlighted in your article, Desktop Tower Defense. When people come to these sites to play games, a Java applet is initiated, which connects the user's computer to our grid computing network. Our customers use that computing power for a variety of fascinating problems. A game site owner just has to include 1 line of iframe code in the HTML body to use Plura. An example of this is: <iframe src="http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="150px" height="100px"></iframe> The parameters you see in that code can be adjusted, so site owners have pretty much complete control over how Plura is run. We've designed our applet to be very lightweight and secure. It follows and is restricted by the Java sandbox model (http://java.sun.com/sfaq http://java.sun.com/sfaq), so it doesn't touch anything on the user's computer and runs completely in memory. We understand that player perception may be a challenge, but we feel the security and control we provide to site owners helps mitigate this. I can share a lot more detail with you if GigaOm is interested in discussing this more. You can go to http://www.pluraprocessing.com http://www.pluraprocessing.com for more info. Because we're currently in beta, we're working with site owners on an invite-only basis, but we do consider people that are interested in Plura and would be a good fit for us. We feel that Plura is a great opportunity for game developers to boost their revenue and profitability. We would also love to hear what the GigaOm community has to say about us, considering your focus on computing technologies. If GigaOm is interested in discussing Plura, please let me know - thanks! --------- N.B. Keep in mind that some of the technology has changed since then (Plura now focuses on desktop apps).. also, I now work for Plura's sister company, 80legs.
- jdrock 17y ago
  P.S. This email resulted in this article: http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-with-grid-computing/ http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-wi...
- nitrogen 17y ago
  Plura sounds pretty cool. I had the vague notion a while ago that society could benefit by somehow using games to solve real-world problems (somewhat like on Stargate Universe). I'm glad to see this is being explored.
  - sparky 17y ago
    I like the idea too. Luis Von Ahn has done some work on tricking people to do useful things through play. 2 examples I can think of are Google Image Labeler(http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/), in which people provide useful metadata about random images on the web, and reCaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/ http://recaptcha.net/), where captcha solutions are used to digitize parts of books where OCR fails.
jlees 17y ago
Show you read the blogs. Show you actually read the blogs. (Comment on them, get to know the different authors, etc.) Identify a writer (someone recently said to pick a junior writer - this is probably a good tip!) and contact them directly, rather than emailing the entire blog. If you can't grab them directly then email the blog team but 10 busy people reading a mailing list/filter with 100 messages a day means you really gotta keep it short and sweet. Depending entirely on the blog, the blogger, and what you're pitching: Keep it short and to the point. Make it newsworthy. Make it interesting and relevant to their readers. Point out why. Give the bloggers something - exclusive preview, beta access, free trials/discount codes to give away. Make yourself available to talk further. Point to a lowdown page about your product/news item that the blogger can link to. Don't sales pitch them to death. Bloggers are humans, they have needs (pageviews and daily quota), they have access points (Twitter, etc) and by understanding them and what they want, rather than just focusing on what you want, you can get far. Another approach is to sweeten the bloggers by going to events etc and make yourself known to them as an authority/someone to watch, maybe dropping them the odd line about stuff NOT your own; then when you launch, they'll jump on it like rabid monkeys.

I've never had much success with this. Can anyone who has comment on how they approach the blogs? Maybe even a copy of a successful email sent to the bloggers?

jdrock 17y ago

Hi, I recently read your article entitled "Where's the Money in Casual Web Game Development?". Our firm, Plura Processing, provides a really easy way for online games to make money through grid computing. If a game developer embeds Plura on his site, we will pay him up to $2600/month for every 1000 concurrent users. This revenue source is a completely new and incremental source of money for game sites, which means it does not have to replace other revenue sources, like advertising. We entered beta a few months ago and currently have a handful of online games as affiliates, including the game you highlighted in your article, Desktop Tower Defense. When people come to these sites to play games, a Java applet is initiated, which connects the user's computer to our grid computing network. Our customers use that computing power for a variety of fascinating problems. A game site owner just has to include 1 line of iframe code in the HTML body to use Plura. An example of this is: <iframe src="http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 http://ourserver.com?affiliate_id=xxx&cpu=0.7 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="150px" height="100px"></iframe> The parameters you see in that code can be adjusted, so site owners have pretty much complete control over how Plura is run. We've designed our applet to be very lightweight and secure. It follows and is restricted by the Java sandbox model (http://java.sun.com/sfaq http://java.sun.com/sfaq), so it doesn't touch anything on the user's computer and runs completely in memory. We understand that player perception may be a challenge, but we feel the security and control we provide to site owners helps mitigate this. I can share a lot more detail with you if GigaOm is interested in discussing this more. You can go to http://www.pluraprocessing.com http://www.pluraprocessing.com for more info. Because we're currently in beta, we're working with site owners on an invite-only basis, but we do consider people that are interested in Plura and would be a good fit for us. We feel that Plura is a great opportunity for game developers to boost their revenue and profitability. We would also love to hear what the GigaOm community has to say about us, considering your focus on computing technologies. If GigaOm is interested in discussing Plura, please let me know - thanks! --------- N.B. Keep in mind that some of the technology has changed since then (Plura now focuses on desktop apps).. also, I now work for Plura's sister company, 80legs.

jdrock 17y ago
P.S. This email resulted in this article: http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-with-grid-computing/ http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-wi...
nitrogen 17y ago
Plura sounds pretty cool. I had the vague notion a while ago that society could benefit by somehow using games to solve real-world problems (somewhat like on Stargate Universe). I'm glad to see this is being explored.
- sparky 17y ago
  I like the idea too. Luis Von Ahn has done some work on tricking people to do useful things through play. 2 examples I can think of are Google Image Labeler(http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/), in which people provide useful metadata about random images on the web, and reCaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/ http://recaptcha.net/), where captcha solutions are used to digitize parts of books where OCR fails.

jlees 17y ago

Show you read the blogs. Show you actually read the blogs. (Comment on them, get to know the different authors, etc.) Identify a writer (someone recently said to pick a junior writer - this is probably a good tip!) and contact them directly, rather than emailing the entire blog. If you can't grab them directly then email the blog team but 10 busy people reading a mailing list/filter with 100 messages a day means you really gotta keep it short and sweet. Depending entirely on the blog, the blogger, and what you're pitching: Keep it short and to the point. Make it newsworthy. Make it interesting and relevant to their readers. Point out why. Give the bloggers something - exclusive preview, beta access, free trials/discount codes to give away. Make yourself available to talk further. Point to a lowdown page about your product/news item that the blogger can link to. Don't sales pitch them to death. Bloggers are humans, they have needs (pageviews and daily quota), they have access points (Twitter, etc) and by understanding them and what they want, rather than just focusing on what you want, you can get far. Another approach is to sweeten the bloggers by going to events etc and make yourself known to them as an authority/someone to watch, maybe dropping them the odd line about stuff NOT your own; then when you launch, they'll jump on it like rabid monkeys.