Update

Edmodo Highlights Reach, Revenue Challenges for Developers Looking to Sell to Schools

Edmodo boasts more than 50 million users, but its store is an increasingly hard place for developers to bring in money.

Edmodo boasts more than 50 million users, but its store is an increasingly hard place for developers to bring in money.

With nearly 50 million users across several countries and school systems, Edmodo is the world’s largest educational learning platform. But even as its educational app store, the Edmodo Store, emerges as a powerful way to connect with teachers its also becoming swamped with apps struggling for attention and revenue.

With its secure student communication system and a familiar, Facebook-style interface, the Edmodo Store offers educators more than 500 apps to download — many of them for free — and to integrate into their lesson plans.

In early 2014, Edmodo announced it would grow partnerships with international educational developers and expand its library of premium and free apps for educators. The resulting rush of developers hoping to score some of the school market has brought a wide range of choice, and with it, varying degrees in the quality of game design.

Steve Cushing is director and partner at Bongo LLP, a 3-person educational app development team based in the UK. The company began posting games to the Edmodo Store in 2012.

It now has over 100 apps in the Edmodo Store.

“As our relationship developed with Edmodo so did the popularity of our apps,” said Cushing. “Edmodo offers providers like us a wonderful opportunity to both reach new markets and integrate with educational functionality such as badges and grade books.”

Their most popular app is Battle Quiz, an English-language vocabulary game with built-in assessment reporting. In the last year it has topped 1.7 million uses.

Cushing, who’s also an author, blogger and proponent of the memory and learning process known as “chunking,” said their work with Edmodo helps them address some of the key issues facing schools’ use of apps in class.

“Students learn best when they are motivated and engaged, but this learning also needs to be in a safe, learning environment. The Edmodo platform provides such a place, where how they learn is just as important as what they learn,” Cushing said.

For educators, part of what makes the Edmodo Store’s attractive is its role as a one-stop shop for games with standards-aligned reporting methods which they can easily slide into their lesson plans.

10monkeys, a Helsinki, Finland-based developer began posting their math-focused educational apps on the Edmodo Store early last year after the 2014 British and Educational Training and Technology Show in London. Sales and Marketing Manager Veronika Vankova says the learning platform’s ease of use is critical.

Sometimes teachers are overwhelmed when trying to find the right solutions, frustrated with [a lot] of usernames and passwords, and many times, unable to purchase individual apps, and together with Edmodo we can tackle these challenges.
–10Monkeys Sales and Marketing Manager Veronika Vankova

With offices in both Finland and California, 10monkeys’ 12-person staff released their first game, Math World, in 2012, and it continues to be their most downloaded app both in and out of the Edmodo Store.

Edmodo has become a regular feature at education conferences.

Edmodo has become a regular feature at education conferences.

But with a global pool of developers continuing to fill the Edmodo Store with more competition for educators’ attention, at least one developer is spending less time devoting resources for Edmodo Store projects.

When Edmodo first opened the doors on its digital app store in 2012, Rocketfuel Games began offering typing apps for 3rd and 4th graders, as well as science games, like Awesome Alchemy, an atom-swapping puzzle game that teaches students how to form basic molecules like water, carbon dioxide, and diamond.

According to Jason Suriano, CEO and creative director of Rocketfuel, the company went through some growing pains along side Edmodo as they were developing their app store, and the company’s initial offerings weren’t always their best. In 2015, Rocketfuel’s relationship with Edmodo is really more of “a side thing,” but Suriano says the revenue stream generated from the Edmodo Store was important in the early goings.

“But when I saw the prices start to drop,” explained Suriano, “from $5 down to $3 and then free, my ‘spidey senses’ started tingling.”

In Suriano’s opinion, as the price point dropped so did the quality of many of the apps.

With dwindling revenue and increasing competition among developers Suriano became increasingly reluctant to devote staff and resources to the development of fresh content for the store.

“It’s like what happened with iOS: there’s so many apps, it’s tough to know where the quality is,” Suriano said.

Edmodo declined to comment on their relationship with game developers or their pricing models, but Suriano said he understands why Edmodo might want to keep non-premium apps free for educators.

“Teachers can’t typically pay a lot of money for educational games,” explained Suriano, whose wife is also an educator, “but for me, the free model they’re doing now made it difficult to continue to build out new games. It generates a little bit of revenue, but not enough to push it as a consistent revenue channel.”

But when other small-scale developers ask Suriano about Rocketfuel’s overall experience posting games in the Edmodo Store, he doesn’t hesitate to say it’s a great litmus test for where your game is at in the development process, and how you can improve it.

“That communication layer is extremely helpful,” Suriano said. “If there’s a problem, you’ll get a direct ticket from the teacher. They might say, ‘It’s not working on this tablet.’ The developer can respond to that and troubleshoot with the teacher, who might normally just uninstall [the app] if they have trouble.”

Instead of trying to send game demos out to potentially interested educational organizations, Suriano also said large platforms like the Edmodo Store provide a valuable, global distribution service that smaller, burgeoning developers don’t always have at their fingertips.

Despite Suriano’s concerns, Bongo’s Cushing said their relationship with Edmodo is going to be an important part of the company’s growth. “Partnerships with secure delivery platforms like Edmodo will undoubtedly be at the core of our company’s future in this marketplace,” Cushing said.

Vankova said 10monkeys will also continue to focus on the Edmodo Store as it tries to find a foothold for its games in higher grade levels.

“Currently, a great part of Edmodo’s users are secondary schools but we are expecting more primary schools to start using Edmodo, and that it will give us new opportunities.”

“It’s a fantastic place to start,” said Rocketfuel’s Suriano. “You have a direct marketplace and an intermediate layer of access to educators. Sometimes developers who are trying to pilot their game consider trying to sell it the [Canadian] government. But I tell them it’s going to be tough. Just post it up to the Edmodo Store and see what happens.”