Super Rewards, an Adknowledge company and one of the largest virtual currency offer platforms on the web, has announced today a new version of its ad offer platform for Flash.  The new platform allows players to accept any Super Rewards payment option without leaving their Flash game.  Previous to this, gamers that wanted to use Super Rewards offers would have to click over to another screen, and sometimes would have to quit their current game to engage in the monetization aspect of the game. Super Rewards is stating that the new platform can be integrated into a Flash game in less than 30 minutes.
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Ayogo Games are an independent social games shop from Vancouver, Canada.  They’ve worked on some high profile titles like Mob Wars, and have some interesting insights into the social games community.  I sat down with CEO Michael Fergusson to discuss the social games environment, monetization and the Vancouver social gaming scene.
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Peanut Labs Media is announcing Cherry Deals Daily Discounts, where social gamers can earn virtual currencies by purchasing local goods and services at discounts of 50% and up.  The idea is a great evolution of the offers and tasks service that Peanut Labs has offered for years, and the relevance of the offers mean that the service is good for all parts of the social games virtual goods value chain.  Retailers’ product offers are shown to users who have a higher likelihood of purchasing, users are presented with huge discounts, and the game makers themselves facilitate a higher number of virtual good transactions.
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Application developers, especially social game developers, want a more effective way of measuring the value of users within their applications. For many social games, offer networks have become the primary source of revenue. Offer networks have faced increasing scrutiny after inserting controversial and relatively valueless offers like IQ Quizzes in exchange for virtual currency. Today, gWallet says that they have a solution to these aggressive offers: gLTV.
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How does an effective CPM of $700 sound to you? That’s what Sometrics is claiming to provide on average to developers who use the company’s existing solutions, the latest of which is a “‘Shop & Earn’ In-Game Shopping Feed”. Users earn in-game currency by shopping at online retailers from around the web. This is not the first time we’ve seen such monetization models. Offerpal, for example, recently released a new shopping rewards program which competes directly with Sometrics new service (pictured below).
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gWallet, one of the newest monetization services for social applications, announced a new round of funding today, which brings the total amount of funding raised to $12.5 million. The service is run by Gurbaksh Chahal, who previously sold two startups at the peak of the internet bubble (at only 16 years old), and has also been featured on the Oprah Whinfrey show, making him a relatively high profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur, although he’s rarely seen at industry events.
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Editor’s Note: This post was written by Ro Choy, Chief Revenue Officer of RockYou. In this series, Choy will address the future of social media monetization, focusing on the potential of platforms such as Facebook and the ability for third parties such as RockYou to create their own platforms and monetize a multi-faceted approach to social media marketing.

The Future of Social Media Monetization

Last year (even six months ago) most questioned whether social media could deliver meaningful business results. Whether it was the daily concern over Facebook’s revenue or the questioned utility of social applications, the general consensus was the entire social media industry was hard to monetize.

Today, the huge success of social games, the increasing number of brand marketers using social media and the myriad of business targets that social media leaders are pursuing (payments, e-commerce, search, etc.) are referenced daily. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the secret monetization strategy that all the large web startups? That’s the question I was looking to answer when I first started writing about the Facebook platform when it opened up over two years ago and after listening to one web luminary after the other I realized there really is no secret sauce to making money on the social web: you’re either selling ads or selling a product.
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I just got back from a great lunch with a local executive who helps run a mobile application company. One of the primary things they are specializing in is building mobile social networks and helping other companies plug into those networks. We had a great conversation about the future of mobile and social networks and the challenges that social networks currently face in entering the mobile arena.

It is also common knowledge that social networking sites already face a challenge within their businesses to effectively monetize their sites. So far, nobody has been extremely effective at it. Facebook has been pulling in new executives to try and make an attempt at new monetization strategies but ultimately working to monetize a site which I argue will not be a central destination point a few years from now is relatively worthless.

Instead, the social network sites are going to turn to mobile as one of the central locations for monetization. Text messages and subscriptions are the norm on mobile carriers. This leads me to believe that perhaps social networks will potentially become a subscription service. The only counter argument to this is that Twitter is not currently monetizing their site aside from one ad that’s displayed on the Japanese version of their site.

While there are no answers as to what will happen in the future, I think a lot of potential for social networks exist on mobile. The real question is if the mobile applications will be monetized or if Twitter is destroying the opportunity for future players. How do you think social networks and mobile will work together?

Last night after reading Noah Kagan’s post about how there is no money in social networking I began seriously thinking about the issue. If there is no money in social networking, why am I investing so much time reading and writing about it? Ultimately, where is the real money to be made out of this? The end result is what I keep coming up with time and time again: personal branding.

If you are looking to make money off of Facebook applications or your own social network, odds are not in your favor. On Facebook for instance, only the top 100 companies at the most are generating substantial revenue from social networks. The rest are scrambling to figure out a way to make money or spending somebody else’s hard earned cash. The largest value to be gained from social networking and social media is building social equity.

Somebody will soon figure out an effective way to monetize relationships (most likely Facebook) but for the most part it will be extremely challenging. As such, I’d suggest leveraging these new technologies to build brand you. I know I posted this yesterday but as I think more about whether these technologies can currently be effectively monetized, the reality is no. It is the brands that end up generating the revenue. So what are you doing to build brand you?