Kwedit, a Mountain View – California based startup, wants to simplify the purchase of virtual goods for teens. The company plans to allow teens to buy virtual goods on Facebook games such as “FarmVille” and “Café World”, if they commit to pay later at 7-Eleven stores or send in money via mail.
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As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success. Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on. There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory. That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan.
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Virtual Goods gold rush is in its early stages, however, the nascent market is showing promise to one day become a major revenue source for Social Networks and Social Games. Engage Digital Media, a market research firm with specialization in virtual goods research, is reporting that more than $1.38 billion were invested in 87 virtual goods related companies in 2009.
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Yelp, the local business search and review site, is said to be in talks to raise additional financing instead of getting acquired or having a go at the IPO. According to reports Yelp is in talks with Elevation Partners – a major investor in Palm Inc., for the new round of funding. What’s significant about the round is the fact that it may include an option for employees and investors to sell their shares to the investors.
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The week of January 18th, 2010 had a lot to offer in the social games department. Zynga demonstratedthe massive ability to raise charity through gaming, Facebook announced a new “Games Dashboard”, South Korea’s Supreme Courts made a major ruling for Virtual Currencies and the BBC re-entered the gaming space. Read on to find out more!
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This week, the South Korean Supreme Court made a ruling stating that online games’ virtual currency, or “cyber money”, can legally be exchanged for real world currency. The ruling also stated that transactions using this “cyber money” will be taxable.
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Zynga, the developer of Farmville, has raised $1.5 million for the earth quake relief efforts in Haiti. Zynga collaborated with World Food Program for the relief efforts and the generated funds would be dispersed via WFP in the affected areas. The money was raised by selling virtual goods to gamers across Zynga’s top four games.
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As an amateur video maker who works in social games, I find it extremely surprising that Social Games, once derided as having no possible profit potential, are able to generate powerful revenues. Because in the video world, ‘monetizing content’ is still a far-away dream.
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This evening Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, announced on his blog that Zynga would begin phasing back in offers after temporarily shutting them down due to the whole “ScamVille” controversy. The primary source of controversy was IQ Quiz advertisements which we’ve covered extensively on AllFacebook over the past year. While sources vary on how large of a revenue stream offers were, sources stated that accounted for upwards of 33 percent of Zynga’s revenue.
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Yesterday Mark Pincus, the CEO of popular social gaming startup Zynga, went on Charlie Rose to discuss the future of the social gaming space. There’s nothing really new stated except for a brief mention of a new startup created by Mark Pincus’ wife. Over the past couple years, Zynga has surged to the top of the social gaming space, now attracting over 230 million monthly active users across all their applications. While growth has appeared to slow for the holidays, Zynga is leaps and bounds beyond any competitors at this point.
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