news

Boasting 300M+ consumer reach in Asia, Yoyo launches Popstar influencer platform

Yoyo Holdings

Masaru Ikeda 2019.08.20

See the original story in Japanese. Manila-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for its PopSlide mobile rewards platform, announced on Monday that it has officially launched a micro influencer platform called PopStar. Since its quiet launch in a stealth mode back in July of last year, the platform has acquired more than 200,000 micro influencers in the Philippines and Indonesia, boasting an accumulated total of 300 million consumers following the influencers as the number of the platform’s marketing reach. The number of their influencers registered is ranked on the top in all across the Asian market where influencer marketing is specifically trending. As a reason why the company can attract such a huge number of influencers, Yoyo Holdings founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada pointed out they could leverage the PopSlide app which helped them reduce the marketing cost for acquiring influencers for PopStar as well as having built a system that allows them to easily manage the entire process from managing influencers to measuring campaign performances. Fukada also told us the story behind why Popstar was launched: Under the mission of allowing people to use mobile internet for free of charge, Yoyo was founded and then launched apps like PopSlide…

popstar-1st-anniversary-party — PopStar hosted a party in Manila in July, celebrated its 1st anniversary with about 100 influencers.
Image credit: Yoyo Holdings

See the original story in Japanese.

Manila-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for its PopSlide mobile rewards platform, announced on Monday that it has officially launched a micro influencer platform called PopStar. Since its quiet launch in a stealth mode back in July of last year, the platform has acquired more than 200,000 micro influencers in the Philippines and Indonesia, boasting an accumulated total of 300 million consumers following the influencers as the number of the platform’s marketing reach.

The number of their influencers registered is ranked on the top in all across the Asian market where influencer marketing is specifically trending. As a reason why the company can attract such a huge number of influencers, Yoyo Holdings founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada pointed out they could leverage the PopSlide app which helped them reduce the marketing cost for acquiring influencers for PopStar as well as having built a system that allows them to easily manage the entire process from managing influencers to measuring campaign performances.

Fukada also told us the story behind why Popstar was launched:

Under the mission of allowing people to use mobile internet for free of charge, Yoyo was founded and then launched apps like PopSlide and Candy. However, marketing condition have been changed a lot since our foundation seven years ago. Now that we see everyone using Ineternet and data charge cost has significantly dropped down.

In our team, we’ve been discussing how we can keep creating values to the society with PopSlide and Candy only. How can we make more impact? How can we create a service that bring people beyond Internet? Such thought inspired us to invent PopStar.

See also:

popstar-dashboard-audition_screenshot — The “Online Audition” function encourages influencers to submit their sample for a tryout.
Image credit: Yoyo Holdings (Image is partially modified.)

Yoyo has built a platform that helps them easily find influencers who are likely to better reach the appropriate target audience according to the subject of their clients in addition to encouraging these influencers to submit their sample for a tryout. Also, the platform’s dashboard can facilitate everything needed for influence marketing, including managing campaigns, creating performance reports for clients, invoicing to clients, and paying rewards to influencers. Leveraging all this, Yoyo claims that all campaign placements can be managed by just a few people in charge.

PopStar clients are vary from crypto exchange, credit card issuer, major drug store chain, underwear brand, to operator of children’s playground. With a variety of influencers, the platform can deal with many different types of products and services which requires it to reach a huge variety of audience.

popstar-one-stop-dashboard — Image credit: Yoyo Holdings

Fukada added:

PopSlide, the mobile rewards platform we’ve been offering since several years ago, is also boasting a high user retention rate. We cannot disclose exact numbers but I think it must be higher than that of typical popular mobile game titles. Wondering one of the reasons why PopStar is going well is we are a product company and are good at making products.

In contrast to celebrities’ push into leveraging digital media such as YouTube marketing effort, the micro influencer segment is still behind in visualizing its components because influencers can also a long-tail in the whole marketing industry.

If they can achieve a data-driven approach and performance improvement through systemization, there would get a huge business opportunity. Yoyo claims that they want to become the top player in this sector by 2020. Fukada didn’t mention whether a regional or global top but that probably means the global one.

news

Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings partners with Philippines’ largest telco PLDT/Smart

Masaru Ikeda 2015.08.09

See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone. In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company. See also: Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia) Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia) Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard) Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points…

See the original story in Japanese.

Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone.

In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company.

See also:

Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia)
Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia)
Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard)

Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points to enjoy free mobile internet service. Currently there are 800,000 PopSlide users in the Southeast Asia region, but with the development of this partnership, they can expect an influx of some percentage of the Philippines 2 million SafeZone users to begin using the PopSlide service.

Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada commented on the partnership with SafeZone.

Both PopSlide and SafeZone(or YOYO and Voyager) have the same vision of inspiring progress in society by providing free access to the internet through its products and partners. I’m sure that this partnership will foster more impactful collaborations through the union of business and technology.

I am so glad to be able to start providing bigger opportunities in the Philippines through our partnership with SafeZone. This is just the beginning. I believe that this is just our first step in creating disruptive innovations in user experience across the region.

Voyager COO Benje Fernandez also commented on the new partnership.

With SafeZone, brands have the opportunity to be ever-present in the lives of users through a device they always carry with them wherever they go.” said Benjie Fernandez, COO of Voyager Innovations Inc.

Our latest partnership with PopSlide is inline with our vision of working with global startups to offer the complete digital lifestyle to the Filipino for free. Now PopSlide users can be rewarded with no data charges.

As for Yoyo Holdings, surely they will be working overtime with the increase in recognition of their service by partnering with the biggest local telco. In an interview with Fukada in May of this year, it was made clear that together, there are 1,000,000 users of Popslide and Candy, a service for getting points that can be exchanged for telephone charges, in southeast Asia, and that expansion into the Indian market will be within the year.

Translated by Connor Kirk
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Asia-focused mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings fundraises from KLab, Gree Ventures

Masaru Ikeda 2015.05.29

See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for providing mobile rewards platforms, announced today that it has secured funding from KLab Global, Gree Ventures, and an unnamed angel investor. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but the raised sum likely ranges around several million US dollars. The company fundraised $1.3 million from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund in the previous round back in May 2014. See also: Candy: A sweet mobile rewards solution from Singapore’s Yoyo Holdings Yoyo launches rewards platform in Indonesia, offers free internet access to Android users Out of all three investors participating in this round, KLab Global is a Singapore-based global business-focused subsidiary of Japanese mobile game development company KLab (TSE:3656). Yoyo Holdings is incorporated in Singapore but runs systems development and business operations mainly in Manila, the Philippines. Based on a partnership with KLab Global, Yoyo Holdings will relocate its Manila operations to inside the office of KLab Cyscorpions, a Manila-based subsidiary of KLab Global, aiming to receive substantial support for engineering efforts and corporate operations. Consisting of about 25 employees, Yoyo Holding provides mobile users with rewards platform: Candy and PopSlide. Candy is a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys,…

See the original story in Japanese.

Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for providing mobile rewards platforms, announced today that it has secured funding from KLab Global, Gree Ventures, and an unnamed angel investor. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but the raised sum likely ranges around several million US dollars. The company fundraised $1.3 million from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund in the previous round back in May 2014.

See also:

Out of all three investors participating in this round, KLab Global is a Singapore-based global business-focused subsidiary of Japanese mobile game development company KLab (TSE:3656). Yoyo Holdings is incorporated in Singapore but runs systems development and business operations mainly in Manila, the Philippines. Based on a partnership with KLab Global, Yoyo Holdings will relocate its Manila operations to inside the office of KLab Cyscorpions, a Manila-based subsidiary of KLab Global, aiming to receive substantial support for engineering efforts and corporate operations.

Consisting of about 25 employees, Yoyo Holding provides mobile users with rewards platform: Candy and PopSlide. Candy is a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks or review submissions – by giving them airtime or prepaid phone credit. Popslide distributes news and weather forecasts as well as other updates and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone. The company’s combined user base from the two services has acquired over a million users to date in the Southeast Asia region.

Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada told The Bridge that they will use the funds to strengthen their engineering development resources:

In Southeast Asia, for instance, many people use an Android phone supporting multiple SIM cards with multiple phone numbers, so we need to support models which are not so common in advanced countries. Even Facebook has developed a mobile app specifically designed for rural areas in this region, where mobile broadband is likely unavailable. In a similar manner, we want to strengthen our engineering in order to better fit the targeted markets.

Coinciding with the funding, the company unveiled that Suni Kang has joined the team. She was previously working at Tonchidot Corporation, the Japanese startup behind the Sekai Camera Augmented Reality (AR) app, followed by working in the Philippines; she wanted to fathom the market potential in the Southeast Asia region. Along with working at an IT company as a project manager in Manila, she has deepened the mutual relationship with Yoyo Holdings by writing a guest post about them for Japanese tech blog Techwave, resulting in her joining the team as a project manager and recruiter.

Aiming to attract the Next Billion Market which accounts for two-thirds of the entire global population, Yoyo Holdings plans on expanding into the Indian market by the end of this year, in addition to enhancing their existing presence in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Unlike typical message apps, a mobile reward app using a lock screen will not typically co-exist with other similar apps in the smartphone since there’s only one lock screen for each mobile. Upon this understanding, Fukada and his team aim to fill the role as a dominant player in this space as soon as possible.

Yoyo won the startup competition and New Economic Summit in April as well as the second prize at Infinity Venture Summit (IVS) 2014 Fall last year. According to Fukada, their massive exposure at IVS helped them lead to the funds at this time around from KLab Global.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Yoyo launches rewards platform in Indonesia, offers free internet access to Android users

Masaru Ikeda 2015.02.23

Manila-based Yoyo Holdings [1], the Japanese-led startup known for its mobile rewards platform Candy, announced last week that it has launched a lock screen-based rewards platform for Android users in Indonesia, called PopSlide. The app is available on Google Play in Indonesia. The platform distributes news, weather forecasts, other updates, and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone. See also: Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings raises $1.3 million From Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto: 13 startups pitch at Launch Pad competition Prior to Indonesia, Yoyo Holdings launched PopSlide in the Philippines in August last year, where the app surpassed 100,000 downloads in only 10 days after launch and stayed on top of the free Lifestyle Category of the Google Play store for 30 days. Their advertisers include major global brands such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Unilever, Intel, and CNN. Yoyo Holdings will launch the service in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, aiming to serve over 400 million Android users in Southeast Asia. Edited by Kurt Hanson Incorporated in Singapore. ↩

Manila-based Yoyo Holdings [1], the Japanese-led startup known for its mobile rewards platform Candy, announced last week that it has launched a lock screen-based rewards platform for Android users in Indonesia, called PopSlide. The app is available on Google Play in Indonesia.

The platform distributes news, weather forecasts, other updates, and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone.

See also:

Prior to Indonesia, Yoyo Holdings launched PopSlide in the Philippines in August last year, where the app surpassed 100,000 downloads in only 10 days after launch and stayed on top of the free Lifestyle Category of the Google Play store for 30 days. Their advertisers include major global brands such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Unilever, Intel, and CNN.

Yoyo Holdings will launch the service in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, aiming to serve over 400 million Android users in Southeast Asia.

Edited by Kurt Hanson

Incorporated in Singapore. ↩

news

Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings raises $1.3 million

Masaru Ikeda 2014.05.21

Singapore-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind online rewards platform Candy, announced today that it has raised about $130 million yen (or $1.3 million) from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, and Incubate Fund. Yoyo plans to use these funds to step up its marketing efforts and solidify back-end infrastructure. The company was launched back in October of 2012 by Yosuke Fukada (see video below) and Yoshiki Okazaki, both of whom previously worked with Japanese internet company DeNA. Their solution rewards users for performing micro-tasks by giving them prepaid phone credit. The service is currently operating in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, with more than 250,000 users acquired across these regions. In this space, we’ve already seen Japanese internet company United has roll out a similar service called DreamGiver, primarily targeting smartphone users in the Philippines.

Singapore-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind online rewards platform Candy, announced today that it has raised about $130 million yen (or $1.3 million) from Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, and Incubate Fund. Yoyo plans to use these funds to step up its marketing efforts and solidify back-end infrastructure.

The company was launched back in October of 2012 by Yosuke Fukada (see video below) and Yoshiki Okazaki, both of whom previously worked with Japanese internet company DeNA. Their solution rewards users for performing micro-tasks by giving them prepaid phone credit. The service is currently operating in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, with more than 250,000 users acquired across these regions.

In this space, we’ve already seen Japanese internet company United has roll out a similar service called DreamGiver, primarily targeting smartphone users in the Philippines.

news

Candy: A sweet mobile rewards solution from Singapore’s Yoyo Holdings

Rick Martin 2013.11.20

Candy (www.can-dy.ph) is a mobile rewards platform, created by Singapore-based startup Yoyo Holdings [1]. It’s a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks, or review submissions – by giving them airtime, or prepaid phone credit. Of course, in emerging markets where credit card penetration and online payments is especially low, there is much opportunity for such an offering to excel. Candy, which launched in the Philippines back in March, has seen promising results thus far. The service, which only accepted new users up until the end of April, saw 30,000 users in its first three weeks, and now has 47,000 subscribers with another 18,000 wait-listed. So far most of the users are in their teens or 20s, with a 64% majority of those being male. I recently had a chance to catch up with Yoyo’s executive officer Arnab Gupta, who explained how their service offers something that many mobile carriers in emerging markets currently lack. Above all else it offers a place to collect and store detailed user information not usually available to telcos. This includes, of course, information like name, telephone number, and age, but also things like education, industry, income,…

Candy (www.can-dy.ph) is a mobile rewards platform, created by Singapore-based startup Yoyo Holdings [1]. It’s a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks, or review submissions – by giving them airtime, or prepaid phone credit. Of course, in emerging markets where credit card penetration and online payments is especially low, there is much opportunity for such an offering to excel.

Candy, which launched in the Philippines back in March, has seen promising results thus far. The service, which only accepted new users up until the end of April, saw 30,000 users in its first three weeks, and now has 47,000 subscribers with another 18,000 wait-listed. So far most of the users are in their teens or 20s, with a 64% majority of those being male.

I recently had a chance to catch up with Yoyo’s executive officer Arnab Gupta, who explained how their service offers something that many mobile carriers in emerging markets currently lack. Above all else it offers a place to collect and store detailed user information not usually available to telcos.

This includes, of course, information like name, telephone number, and age, but also things like education, industry, income, and employment.

So when it comes to things like surveys, questionnaires, or reviews, what Candy offers will likely be more appealing to advertisers or corporate clients looking to learn more about an emerging market like the Philippines.

Their client list looks pretty impressive so far with a number of large notable Japanese companies already under its belt. Their initial goal is to succeed in the Philippines, in the hopes of becoming the top mobile platform in emerging markets like this one. To that end, the team is currently working out of Manilla, and there are plans to expand outwards to Thailand and Indonesia by the end of this year. The see lots of potential in the smartphone market especially, and will be focusing their efforts on that front.

Readers may recall that we briefly mentioned them in our coverage of Rising Expo a few weeks back. If their initial success continues, I expect we’ll likely hear much more from the Candy team in the coming months.

It’s encouraging to see that the folks at Yoyo are also being good citizens too, launching a program to send free airtime to many of those affected by the devastating Typhoon Haiyan earlier in the month. You can find out more about that initiative here.

To learn more about Candy, check out the video above, featuring CEO and co-founder Yosuke Fukada.

Incorporated in Singapore. ↩

Yoyo Holdings

Boasting 300M+ consumer reach in Asia, Yoyo launches Popstar influencer platform

Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings partners with Philippines’ largest telco PLDT/Smart

Asia-focused mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings fundraises from KLab, Gree Ventures

Yoyo launches rewards platform in Indonesia, offers free internet access to Android users

Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings raises $1.3 million

Candy: A sweet mobile rewards solution from Singapore’s Yoyo Holdings

Recent Articles

Trends

Yoyo Holdings

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Recent Articles

Trends