Greystripe secures $8.9M in funding

Greystripe, the ad-supported mobile game distributor, has secured significant funding led by Disney’s venture capital arm, Steamboat Ventures.

by Helen Leggatt

Greystripe is behind mobile game site GameJump.com. The site delivers free, ad-sponsored games and other services, including chat, via AdWRAP technology. AdWRAP provides an automated process to enable ads to be wrapped directly with mobile games and applications without any complex coding and development for the content owner.

Since its launch in August 2006, the site has served up over 7 million downloads, 5.6 million of which were in the last five months.

According to Greystripe, the latest funding of $8.9 million will go towards expanding GameJump.com’s global reach, particularly in Europe and Asia, and towards developing partnerships with advertisers and content creators.

The mobile marketing and advertising industry is growing and will continue to do so, say ABI Research, who predict a worth of $19 billion by 2011, $3 billion up on the forecast for 2007. However, not all publishers feel that ad-sponsored content is the way forward.

“Giving away games for free with an ad-supported model is not a good thing at this time,” said Namco Networks’ executive Scott Rubin. “I think we as an industry have done a great job of training consumers to pay a few dollars for a game. I don’t think putting ads around games and giving them away for free is a good thing for the industry.”