Nought to 55 million in 12 months

Well, not really! Some of the publishers we've been working with longer tend to be pretty open. Sometimes they'll send us the monetisation data, but other than that we have to deal with the data that's public. Also we have our bar running on all the pages so we can use that to measure page views and see trends. We are a marketing channel for publishers, and they use us if we benefit them.

Some of the publishers we've been working for a long time - well, we've only been doing this a year, so that's a relative term - but we have a good relationship with them, they're very upfront about how they feel and how they see it. If they test out our competition, and we ask them, they tell us why. With 400-500 customers and four people dealing with the account management we can't get very deeply into it. We're hiring! [laughs]

Yes, this is what it all boils down to. What we talk about a lot is that the exchange needs to be fair, it has to benefit everybody. In that case, us running a network like this is beneficial to the partners - we have no personal interest in the traffic, other than it working well.

Therefore I believe that it's a good idea to use a third party for this. I know there's been some talk among big developers about doing cross-promotion between games. I know that they can do that, and sometimes it's beneficial, but in the bigger picture it works better if you have a third party who focuses on the trade being fair. One of the things we do to improve that fairness is to measure retention.

It's more a general movement of numbers. At that level we're not really interested in the individual, it's about trends and how applications move. For retention tracking we get to low levels but we branch it out to bigger numbers. One of the reasons is that we're an ad network but we want to be really careful with user privacy. When we go down to individual user tracking, there's always the question of identification. Whenever we do individual tracking, there's never any identification information attached to that, so we don't know who that user is. We know we're tracking them, but we don't have any link back to the actual user.

It's standard, cookie-based tracking that's totally anonymous. We could never extract personal information from that.

We're gathering that data in some form, but it's not connected to individuals.

Our CEO has been meeting with Facebook. We've talked about what we do, and we're still there. We're a Facebook approved app provider, so we're on good terms with them. When dealing with a single platform you always have to keep in mind the platform's own interests. I think we're beneficial. We improve retention and discovery. With the introduction of Facebook Credits, Facebook's personal motivation is to get people to play more games, so we help with that. When they're taking a 30 per cent revenue share on the credits, the more people that play, the more money they get.

I personally see Facebook Credits as being a great source of income for Facebook in the future.

Yes, what I've been hearing is that they're making them mandatory in terms of them having to be present as an option, but they're offering benefits to people who use them exclusively. As they've stated themselves, you can use other payment methods but if I were a game developer on Facebook myself, I'd adopt Facebook credits instantly. I mean, the ease of use... What they're doing is what Apple's been doing on the App Store - purchasing is incredibly easy. Typing in your credit card number every time is never easy. It's a showstopper for many people.

They have a wide distribution network for buying Facebook Credits - I think they sell them at Target. It's incredibly easy, you click okay and you've bought stuff - you've got to love that.