Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Apparently Undeterred by Apple Crackdown, Tapjoy Investors Pour In $30M More

Tapjoy, which has seen its app marketing business significantly affected by Apple’s changed stance on in-app promotions, is still charging ahead. The company last week raised $30 million in a round led by J.P. Morgan that includes all its existing investors. It plans to formally announce the round tomorrow morning.

Tapjoy has already evolved at least once from its days as the Facebook app promoter Offerpal. “We have been very successful in rebuilding the firm and now it’s time to step on the gas a little bit,” CEO Mihir Shah said today.

Shah maintained that Tapjoy investors were not at all deterred that Apple is no longer approving apps that contain Tapjoy “offer walls” to encourage users to download other apps, even though many developers have been significantly impacted by losing the promotional boost from this Tapjoy feature.

Shah said today that Tapjoy is independent of any platform, noting the company recently debuted a fund to help app developers port to Android and launched on Windows Phone 7 last week. Other platforms could include HTML5, international and direct-to-consumer, Shah said.

“We’re still very strong on iOS and strong on Android,” Shah said, noting that pay-per-install is not Tapjoy’s only offering. “It’s a combination of installs, engagements and others that drive discovery and lifetime value.”

Tapjoy continues to be profitable, Shah said, and will now look at making acquisitions. The new funding counts as Tapjoy’s Series D, and comes after a $21 million raise that was announced in January.

Meanwhile, it looks as though social Web services like Twitter and Facebook are setting themselves up to play a much larger role in mobile app discovery.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik