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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Social Gold, a popular virtual currency and payments solution provider, announced yesterday that their payments platform will be made available in GamerSafe’s community of over 10,000 online game developers and publishers.  This will enable microtransactions payments from within any GamerSafe game, and is a move to increase the ARPU for these games.  GamerSafe is a service that allows game developers to add unique features to their games: universally saved games, achievements, microtransactions and virtual currency.
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Social iPhone game MyTown will now allow players to “check-in” to real-life stores and key areas near H&M stores to gain virtual clothing items and points. The game is a location-based style augmented reality game, where players are able to accumulate points by visiting real world locations with their iPhone and registering that they have visited.  H&M, in partnership with appssavvy and MediaCom, have jumped on board to not only reward players who enter H&M, but to incentivize players who are near H&M by giving them special “Blue” clothing items as they approach the store.
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Meez Nation – a 13-million strong online virtual world aimed at teenagers – recently partnered with AdNectar to introduce social gifting into its universe, and according to Meez Nation, users have sent double the expected number of Hot Pocket gifts so far.  With the support of AdNectar’s proprietary Virtual Goods system, Meez now has an engaging virtual gifting service on top of their existing virtual goods service that has kicked off well with the support of the Hot Pockets brand.  This will likely lead to more sponsorships.
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According to a new report published by Social Gold, 56% of virtual goods customers make repeat purchases.  This comes on the heels of their partnership with MiniClip.com, where Social Gold will be used as the virtual currency for the site’s 550 games and 57 million players.  The report also discusses the average spend per customer.  I’ve attached the Social Gold image below, which highlights some of the key statistics.
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San Francisco-based BOKU Mobile, one of the big competitors in the ‘pay-by-mobile’ space, has announced a partnership with Globe Telecom, a leading Mobile Operator in the Philippines, to expand Globe’s GCash (not to be confused with gWallet) virtual currency to be accepted at all BOKU Mobile compliment vendors. Users of GCash – an extremely popular virtual currency for the Phillipines – will now be able to use that currency to purchase virtual goods (and eventually real goods) across BOKU’s network of merchants which currently “is enabled across 190 carriers worldwide in over 60 countries, and reaches a potential 1.8 billion customers” according to BOKU.
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SponsorPay, a Berlin – Germany based virtual goods monetization startup, has acquired GratisPay, a European competitor developing a similar service.
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Merchants, are you tired of losing online sales because you only take payment by credit card? Mobile First, a provider of premium SMS text messaging services, just announced their Mobile Payment processing solution. Your online customers can now make purchases using their text messaging-enabled cell phones – a method that Mobile First claims has at least 8x the conversion factor, at least in the USA.
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OfferPal – the social media advertising and monetization company that allows users to gain virtual currency by participating in offers, surveys and more – has announced a new method of monetization: Tasks.  Specifically, they are utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk artificial intelligence system to source the tasks.  Amazon’s MT system enables people to do small tasks that can’t be completed by computers themselves, and the broker of the transaction (here, Offerpal), receives a bit of compensation for the task.
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Hi-Media Payments, a leader in Europe’s virtual currency and microtransaction world, recently opened up an office in San Francisco to start its American version of the Allopass payments system. The Allopass payments system is a large platform in Europe, servicing 250,000 merchants and seeing 7 million transactions a month, with 15 million Euros changing hands.  With their initial client list including mostly other offer and monetization providers like Peanut Labs and Sometrics, we can see that Allopass is positioning itself as a uniter of currencies, and attempting to be a large player in the virtual monetization game.
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