LeapFish has a game-like name

Sometimes there comes a point where you’ve seen so many “web 2.0” names that they start to sound the same.  I know a game company called PlayFish, which is a lot like LeapFish.  Then there’s BigFish, PlayFirst, and other guys.  This type of brand confusion can be both good and bad.

If you’re the smaller player, then this is good initially, since the bigger brand has something you can draft off of.  It’s kind of like the Chinese manufacturers that make Nike replicas, but call them Mike with a swoosh symbol—most consumers couldn’t tell.  I certainly didn’t notice the first time that I went to Beijing and saw the knock offs.  The quality was good—and sometimes perhaps better than the original.

In the case of LeapFish, they are not a knock-off, but a legitimate brand that already has traffic and some staying power.  They’re Alexa sub 10,000, so you know that’s already decent traffic.  But they’re not in the top 1,000 sites, which means they’re not able to reap the premium CPMs that come with larger brand advertisers—or have the scale necessary to really make it happen with a direct sales team and an ad platform. 

But give it time!