For what it's worth, DAU is "Daily Active Users" and MAU is "Monthly Active Users". It'd be nice if the article author took the time to explain acronyms in an interview such as this (which is otherwise quite interesting to me, as a complete outside to the app store, mobile apps and gaming).
Interestingly, the article is in fact the sixth google result (to me) for "DAU mobile advertising" (as I initially thought the term referred to some form of advertising). Two of those remaining 5 results above it are also from the "insideX" network. Obviously those terms have become common within the network, and the article authors have forgotten that most people have no idea what DAU/MAU mean.
Hey Leo, we consider ourselves an industry site where the readers are primarily game developers, consumer-facing mobile app developers, advertising networks or the platforms themselves.
DAU and MAU is common parlance in the community, but we'll break it out in the future! We try not to focus on less meaningful stats like installs or downloads if we can. Those numbers can easily be manipulated or be poorly representative, if the app has a bad retention rate.
That there are "whales" that power a large chunk of in game spending truly suprised me. That the gaming industry uses the same word for these big spenders as Casinos, given the criticisms around social gaming being akin to gambling is disturbing.
"we limit whales. When we were getting guys that were spending $20,000 a day in our game. (Editor’s note: Yes, we were incredulous about this figure too. But we double-checked with A Thinking Ape by e-mail on this and they said $20,000, as in real – not virtual – currency.)"
These people do exist. I used to play MMO's a lot more than I'd like to admit, and during the time I probably went through ~5k selling game items for real money and vice versa and personally dealt with some "whales". I can think of about 20 people who I knew from in game who spent sums in the range of 10-20k. I'm sure there's people who spent much more but I didn't ever talk to them directly.
I can understand spending that over the life of a game - but $20k every day? If they played 100 times a year - playing just twice a week - that would be over $2M per year. That is probably more than Charlie Sheen spends on hookers - I am sorry but I just can't believe it. What could they possibly be spending it on?
Note that this isn't specific to iOS. Back 3 years ago when I went to a lot of social network conferences a common theme among companies that monetized through virtual goods talked about said whales too.
Really, its less the social gaming, and more a feature of multiplayer. I know multiplayer is social, but people don't usually label things like WoW, battlefield 3, diablo 2, etc, a "social game" - social games usually refer to multiplayer games with thin gameplay.
However, I have seen a few indie WoW-like MMOs with virtual goods that also have whales, which tends to make me believe its more an aspect of multiplayer+virtual goods.
Interestingly, the article is in fact the sixth google result (to me) for "DAU mobile advertising" (as I initially thought the term referred to some form of advertising). Two of those remaining 5 results above it are also from the "insideX" network. Obviously those terms have become common within the network, and the article authors have forgotten that most people have no idea what DAU/MAU mean.
Explain your acronyms!