Hungarian games empire built on a shoestring
The Scotsman, November 1998
AN AGEING building above a cluttered shoe store in Budapest is an unlikely base for one of the world's most popular internet companies.
But from just such a location, a group of young programmers and business school graduates has built a company that runs the most popular site of on-line entertainment in the world,according to analysts.
E-Pub's site, Uproar.com (at www.uproar.com), is one of the 30 most popular internet addresses of any kind. "We have had dramatic growth in the last year," says Timothy Ewing, E-Pub's 32-year-old European president. "Things just started clicking."
E-Pub, founded in February 1995, owns and operates a variety of websites and internet properties where users play games, chat and win cash prizes. Games are free to play and revenue comes from advertising. Uproar registered 3.7 million players in September, according to NetRatings, a provider of on-line marketing intelligence.
Such numbers make the firm the most popular entertainment site on the web and put it in the company of the internet powerhouses such as Yahoo! and the book retailer Amazon, says Gerhard Auer, an analyst at ICE Securities in Vienna. "It is basically becoming a tier-one site, with the technology coming out of Budapest," he said, adding that E-Pub is positioned to be one of the first internet companies actually to make money.
The games, which start every few minutes 24-hours a day, include Cosmo's Conundrum, a trivia competition hosted by a cyber monkey and a "syndicated" game, which is linked to thousands of other sites, called Bingo Blitz. Such syndicated games, now linked to more than 10,000 other websites, help the company to gain new players and increase revenues through advertising, Ewing said. Nearly all the revenue comes from regular advertisers in the United States and the UK such as
Disney, Microsoft, Ameritech, Sony and the New York Times. The company has more than 30 "blue chip" advertisers, who pay per ad impressions and it has sales departments in London and New York.
Sorry, no link. When they changed their website they did not update their archives completely. However, they gave me a copy when I emailed and requested it.
Dave
|
