SPILL GROUP christmas message!

“who would ever think that a dutch company could grow from zero uniques traffic in april 2005 to more than 60 million unique visitors worldwide per month?”

SPILL GROUP owns domains like game.com.cn, xiaoyouxi.com, juegos.com, games.co.uk and many more…

The Netherlands,

Hilversum, december 22^nd 2007

From; Reinout te Brake

Group Strategist SPILL GROUP

Subject; The years 2007/08

To all,

It is that time of the year; Christmas and New Year!

As most of you do know I want to tell you more about what happened with SPILL GROUP and what will happen with SPILL GROUP. Not dry reading material only, there should be a funny note too.

So first of all;

Merry Christmas for all of you, I hope you had a healthy, wonderfull and successful 2007. Of course I wish you all the best for 2008!

Christmas joke;

So just remember this one when you are sitting down with your friends and relatives for the Christmas dinner;

Who is never hungry at Christmas ?
The turkey - he's always stuffed !

Christmas facts;

So every year I am saying that in Holland we have the first and the second Christmas day. People from the UK say; hell no no, that is not correct, because it is the 24^th and other people have other ideas about Christmas, but we all agree to this;

Christmas is an annual holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus. The date of the celebration is traditional, and is not considered to be his actual date of birth. In most places around the world, Christmas Day is celebrated on December 25. Christmas Eve is the preceding day, December 24. In the United Kingdom and many countries of the Commonwealth, Boxing Day is the following day, December 26. In Catholic countries, Saint Stephen's Day or the Feast of St. Stephen is December 26. The Armenian Apostolic Church observes Christmas on January 6. Eastern Orthodox Churches that still use the Julian Calendar celebrate Christmas on the Julian version of 25 December, which is January 7 on the more widely used Gregorian calendar, because the two calendars are now 13 days apart.

So let me take you through 2007 quickly;

This year 2007 was an amazing year. Not only did we hook up with a VC company (Van den Ende & Deitmers (http://endeit.nl/eng/eng_home.html), who helped us greatly by giving advice during acquisitions and roll out of the strategy. We also got some very nice domains like www.juegos.com (means games in Spanish) and www.games.co.uk. In this year we also did grow very fast with our (game-) traffic. In November we broke through the 55 million unique visitors and if we maintain our growth-path for December we will hit the 60 million unique visitors.

This growth has reasons why. We launched a new type of gameportal (www.agame.com) and we introduced a portal that is focusing on girls; www.girlsgogames.com. Both are very successful so we launched localized versions throughout the year. To get an actual list of our gameportals, please visit our site; http://spillgroup.com/gameportals.php.

What also did amaze me was the number of people that started to work within our company. Since april 2005 when we worked with 6 people, we have grown to more then 40 people in Holland, 15 people in Poland and 63 people in China. Our human resource department is working 24/7 and is on the look-out every day for talent. Still we are looking for portal managers, campaign/advertising managers, maintenance people, system engineers, programmers, content managers and people that would like to get us coffee!

Find all of our job openings here; http://spillgroup.com/jobs.php

In 2007 we had to “upgrade” the company. We got a CFO onboard (Willem van Wijmen, see http://spillgroup.com/management_willem.php), we worked on our commercial side with the help of Lisette Schipper (http://spillgroup.com/management_lisette.php).

Two other things were also important; legal and hosting. Starting with hosting, you cannot say online “sorry we are closed, come back tomorrow”. Robbert van Os (http://spillgroup.com/management_robbert.php) and his team made sure that our hosting went from “good” to “superior”. Globalhosting is a word that I heard many times. Having said that, what is a company without good contracts. I think that Ramon Frankfort (http://spillgroup.com/management_ramon.php) has never seen more contracts in 2007 then in any other year.

Last but not least; SPILL GROUP ASIA. Marc van der Chijs (http://marc.cn/blog) is still leading the way for us in China and the rest of asia. Not only did ZlonGames grow very fast (http://zlongames.com/), we also introduced GameDino (http://www.gamedino.com/) and Seeriously (http://www.seeriously.com/) as two new brands for casual games and serious games. Also Marc finalized an acquisition and bought www.xiaoyouxi.com.

Of course I should mention more people; Frank Polanen (running the maintenance department), Ivo Teel (running the system engineering department), Peter Hofstede/Michael Louw (who jointly set up our game concept/game development department. They are their team-members did an outstanding performance!

Let’s not forget two other persons; Peter Driessen (CEO) and Bennie Eeftink (COO). Two realy Dutchmen that you can describe like this; The Dutch tend to judge foreign cultures using the standards and values they hold clear. Traditionally, the socio-political climate in the Netherlands has been one of collaboration and working towards compromises. In comparison to many other cultures, the Dutch are rather reserved in public and do not often touch each other or display anger or extreme exuberance. This is why people and cultures who display these "vices", for example those living around the Mediterranean Sea, are regarded as being too emotional. In Dutch society, extravagantly flaunting ones emotions (whether positive or negative) is easily seen as an 'act'. It's neatly illustrated by the Dutch proverb "Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg" (Just act normal, you'll be crazy enough already). More you can find here, so suddenly you may understand us; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_people#Dutch_names

What can I say. The year 2007 was quite a ride, besides us buying www.zapjuegos.com, www.clickjogos.com, starting www.gamesgames.com and invested in several new own games like;

- http://www.gamesgames.com/game72907.html

- http://www.gamesgames.com/game67212.html

- http://www.gamesgames.com/game62160.html

- http://www.gamesgames.com/game45935.html

- http://www.gamesgames.com/game49778.html

A year where we closed new agreements with among all Stardoll (http://stardoll.girlsgogames.com), PowerChallenge (http://powerfootball.ojogos.com.br/) and RunEscape (http://runescape.jetztspielen.de/). Still as we speak we are negotiating with some parties about new long term deals.

Last but not least; we bought a major share in a german company. We welcomed Martin Schiele and his team in our company. If you talk about dedication and game-minded, you talk about this. The company is called Qforge (www.qforge.de) and the platform you will find here; http://www.qplaygames.com/games.htm?ref=qforge and some of the games in our portals like for example; http://www.games.co.uk/game72239.html.

The year 2007;

In 2007 we saw lots of people get more interested in the gaming space. More venture money came available.Lots of companies made quite some progress. Lets say ‘social’ did meet ‘games’ and ‘games’ did meet ‘advertising’.

A quick review if you would like to get a crash course;

Oberon and MySpace;

http://www.socaltech.com/myspace_oberon_team_on_casual_games/s-0011888.html

Real bought gametrust and Atrative;

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/realnetworks-acquires-brazil-based-casual-game-studio-atrativa/#When:15:31:00Z

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-realnetworks-to-buys-online-casual-games-site-gametrust-price-less-than/

EA and Hasbro;

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118670816533693824.html?mod=rss_media_and_marketing

PowerChallenge got VC money;

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/05/swedish_soccer.html

Kongregate got extra funding;

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15105

WildTangent raises 20 million dollars;

http://www.redherring.com/Home/23255

MochiAds put ads in flashgames;

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9797689-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware

Lots of stuff to read as you can see. Of course with SPILL GROUP we were in the middle. Still I do compare us with a company like Wallmart. We should have the best possible products and as lots of daily visitors. The target is 100 million unique visitors per month. That is do-able!

The year 2008;

For 2008 we will focus on the following points;

- Increase traffic to 100 million uniques per month (worldwide)

- Increase advertising revenues per site and per country (worldwide)

- Acquire/license high quality web-based flash games

We do realize that our content has to be better than that of our competitors. Our visitors should find the best games on our gameportals and that of course should convince them to come back, day after day, month after month. We are looking for game-developers worldwide to help us with creating localized content for the localized gameportals. In 2008 we will introduce a new way to work with game-developers. Our intention is to introduce this during Casuality2008 in Amsterdam. Of course you can already schedule meetings for Casuality2008, please mail me at reinout@spillgroup.com. I would be more then happy to inform you more about our strategy for the next 2-3 years.

The site and its local version girlsgogames.com will continue to grow in 2008. Content for girls (6-12) more then ever is important. The same for site agame.com and its local version. This site slowly will focus more on boys/male (6-12/13-19). I would appreciate also if you send this message to friends/collegues so that they maybe can help us with these targets. If you know exerienced and qualified people that would be interested to work within a growing gaming company, please let me know.

Like I said in the beginning of this email. Not only reading material. We are all about games, so I will let you go with some games in the spirit of Christmas;

So for your kids I have this;

http://www.gamesgames.com/game61237.html

http://www.gamesgames.com/game72084.html

For the women I got;

http://www.gamesgames.com/game39158.html

http://www.gamesgames.com/game13611.html

For the men of course;

http://www.gamesgames.com/game74977.html

http://www.gamesgames.com/game74856.html

Finaly special thanks to all the people that helped us find domains, games, people and took the time for visiting and talking to us. We hope to see and talk to all of you next year.

Have a great Christmas season.