Today, Offerpal released the results of a survey that targeted social gamers’ monetization activities.  Specifically, the report found that 29.7% of social gamers do not have the ability or means to pay for virtual currencies with cash, and 53.3% of consumers are willing to engage in alternative payments, like offers, to earn virtual currency. The report also found some other interesting statistics related to monetization behavior.
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Understanding the viral invitation process and successful virality of Facebook social games is a subject that warrants deep investigation, and a formal paper on just such a topic has been released by a group of researchers and industry veteran Manu Rekhi.  In “Diffusion Dynamics of Games on Online Social Networks”, the group investigates the invitation process of users within social games, specifically focusing on “predicting invitation efficiency and understanding the group and social dynamics of invitation networks”.
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A new Pew Internet report suggests that newspapers and radio are falling behind TV and the Internet as sources of news. The report, subtitled “How Internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience,” shows that over 60% of Americans are getting a portion of their news online. Only 50-54% get their news from a local newspaper or the radio. However, over 90% use multiple sources — as many as “four to six media platforms” — for their news.
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A recently published study found that achievement in a video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three specific structures of the brain. Intrigued by something he noticed about gamers, Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, decided to investigate why expert game players tend to have improved measures of attention and perception, but when training novice game players, those measures could not be improved, even over 20 hours of practice. His theory was that novice players couldn’t learn because the veteran players had specialized brains, and he put this to the test in his latest study. The study may in the future be a stepping stone to understand how the social benefits of social gaming attract players of different types.
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Consumers spent more than five and a half hours on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in Dec, 2009, according to a report by Nielsen. The amount of time spent on social media sites has increased by 82% from the same time last year, when users only spent three hours on social media sites each day.
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The home insurance premiums of Facebook and Twitter users could be raised by as much as 10%, according to a recent report. Social media and location aware services such as Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Foursquare, Gowalla and others can alert criminals when a user is at a specific spot and not at their home.
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A new white paper, published by Merkle Inc., suggests that social media users are more likely to check their email inboxes than people who do not use social media. The study, conducted in Fall 2009, had several interesting findings. While many reports have suggested that Facebook and other social networks are replacements to email, this report would suggest that users are much more likely to use both products together.
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2009 saw a tremendous increase in usage of Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and could easily be termed as the Year of Social Media. This growth in the usage of social and collaboration platforms has led the enterprises to seriously consider using social platforms for business collaborations, according to Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner Research.
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A new report published by eMarketer today suggests that one of the best ways brands can capture the attention of internet users is by “providing relevant news and analysis” as well as providing “new ideas and thinking”. In other words, brands need to educate the user. By providing educational content, the theory is that internet users will reciprocate by providing support to the brands that educate them.
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