Applorer, which aims to be the Nielsen of mobile games, hits 100k downloads

When we first covered Applorer in March 2012, the app was just beginning to show some traction. Now, it turns out that the concept has bite in the consumer market, hitting 100,000 downloads within a year.

Available on Google Play, Applorer is a game discovery service that ranks titles based on actual gameplay statistics and personal preferences. While it has become easier to make mobile games, discovery mechanisms have not kept pace. It is still exceedingly hard for promising apps to find traction.

From the consumer’s point of view, existing rating systems still leave much to be desired. Just because a game has plenty of five-star ratings or appears at the top of the app store does not mean that a person will enjoy playing it. In fact, it is even possible for crappy app developers to use pay-to-plug services to give their games a fake sheen.

So there’s certainly room for a service like Applorer to sieve signal from the noise.

Out of 100,000 downloads, it is getting between 15,000 to 20,000 monthly active users, and about 2,500 daily active users. At best, that’s a 15 percent month-on-month growth from March 2012, where it had 5,000 monthly actives. Certainly a respectable result.

Created by Stream Media, which raised a USD 0.8M Series A round from SingTel Innov8 and Stream Global in 2011, Applorer is shaping up to become the Neilsen of mobile games by analyzing in-app behavior and trends as well as the users who play these games.

In the short term, the company hopes to monetize the app through advertising for developers that enable app makers to better target the people they want to reach. It is also finalizing a partnership with mobile operator XL Axiata in Indonesia to launch a localized, white-label version of Applorer.

Telco partnerships are certainly a key plank of Stream Media’s distribution strategy. Last year, it debuted a special version of Applorer on SingTel’s MyAppsMall, a web store that is available to SingTel customers.