RockYou raises $23M in funding based on its business of running older games

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RockYou has raised $23 million in funding from Columbia Capital as part of its strategy of operating aging social games at a profit.

Above: Lisa Marino of RockYou

Image Credit: RockYou

San Francisco-based RockYou has expanded over the past couple of years by acquiring social games from Disney (Kitchen Scramble, Words of Wonder, City Girl, Gardens of Time) and Kabam (the Facebook and web versions of Kingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis). It makes money from these by running in-game ads to the players.

The company’s in-game video advertising platform currently delivers over 1 billion impressions a month, placing RockYou in the Top 10 of ComScore’s Top 100 Video Properties for January 2015, the company said.

“Over the past two years, we have built a media company that grows audiences at scale for an app-driven, multiplatform world. That effort is paying off, both for our content partners and players of these popular games,” said RockYou CEO Lisa Marino in a statement. “With Columbia Capital’s vote of confidence, we now have the flexibility to build our business even more aggressively.”

RockYou will use this funding from Columbia Capital to continue growing and diversifying its audience through partnerships with developers of established, still-popular games. It will also expand its mobile catalog.

“RockYou has transformed itself into a leading digital media platform with superior reach and engagement,” said Jeff Patterson, a partner at Columbia Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to back an innovative and scalable platform, run by a truly world-class team, that provides an impressive solution for developers to sustain monetization from their game libraries. We believe that we are just on the cusp of greater things to come as RockYou extends deeper into the game ecosystem and continues to expand into mobile.”

RockYou has more than 92 million consumers on mobile, Facebook, and the Web.