Zynga will now be offering rewards to its millions of social gamers to play Zynga games even more. The social gaming giant bought out a domain name Rewardville, which lead to a lot of speculations as to what Zynga plans to do with this new domain. It turns out that instead of being the name of yet another Facebook game, Rewardville would be used to pay out rewards to players of Zynga games.
Zynga has not made any official announcements about the program, but the fact that the site is live with all the necessary information and functionality pretty much sums up that the rewards program is in place. An important caveat of Zynga rewards is that you can not redeem the rewards for real cash, but can only use the rewards to get Zynga’s virtual currency – which can then be used to buy virtual goods across the wide array of Zynga games.
Zynga rewards involve zCoins and zPoints. zPoints are earned by playing Zynga games. A user can earn a maximum of 80 zPoints per game each day, with a maximum of 300 points across all Zynga games. By accumulating zPoints, you can increase your zLevel and earn zCoins (Zynga’s virtual currency), which can then be used to purchase game items.
FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Treasure Isle and Zynga Poker are currently part of the rewards program. Zynga do mentions it on the site that it would soon be adding other games (including the hit CityVille) to the rewards program.
As a company focused on innovation we’re constantly testing new products and features. When experimenting with new products we take the feedback we receive and apply it to deliver the best possible user experience. We look forward to hearing how our users like RewardVille.
Another point to note about the rewards program is that Zynga users would have to make a separate user account on Rewardville site, and unlike Zynga games the rewards wont work with the Facebook login. The real motivation of this move is beyond us, but may be Zynga wants to have its own database of user credentials as an alternate to relying solely for Facebook Pages and other Facebook provided tools to communicate with its gamers.
What will social gaming in 2011 look like in the Middle East? Does it mean anything to developers that the primary users on Facebookin the Middle East are NOT female? Why is it that 50% of Facebook users in the Middle East use the English interface? Social gaming will be growing in the India market, but in a slightly different way in the MENA region.
Just recently, the MENA region – which consists of the Middle East and North Africa – received their first major investment for social gaming. Interactive Venture (IV) Holdings – a company that invests in start-up businesses for the Arab audience – backed two Jordian companies this past week: Wizard Productions and Gate2Play. Not only are investments becoming more common in the MENA region for gaming, but for entrepreneurs in general for international opportunities.
Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s economies are expected to grow by 4%-6% in 2011, this will in return establish a more stable climate for businesses. Along with growing economies, the MENA region is expected to increase in population by 1%-3%. The Middle East alone has a population of 212,336,924, which is 3.1% of the world’s population. Within that number are 63,240,946 internet subscribers – a growth of 1,825.3% from the year 2000.
Out of the 63 million internet users in the region, 15 million of them claim to use Facebook. Although Facebook saw an increase of 3.5 million Arabic users, because of their decision to create an Arabic interface, 50% reported using English as their primary Facebook language, while 25% selected French as their language of choice (the French language was spread across Africa during 19th century colonization).
Language preference depends upon where you are in the MENA region. Egyptian Facebook users primarily choose the English interface (64.6percent). In Saudi Arabia, where 29% of internet users log onto Facebook, consumers are split between Arabic and English. 82.3% of users in Morocco, on the other hand, select French as their primary language. So, what does language in the MENA region tell us about social gaming?
In order to be successful in the MENA region, gaming developers will be compelled to focus on the primary language of a particular area, not only the region as a whole. Zynga has opened theirFarmVille user base by creating FarmVille 中文版, the Chinese version of the game. This same strategy needs to be adapted to social gaming in the MENA region. However, it’s a little more complicated than that.
The Middle East and the North African region share similar cultural norms. For successful gaming development, companies need to be able to formulate games that put together the cultural norms and the language of choice for that specific state. Happy Oasis, an Arabic game developed by Aranim, creates an almost impeccable example of the language plus culture approach. Aranim’s game, based on the FarmVille concept, but in a Middle Eastern environment, allows users to switch between the English and Arabic versions of the game.
Developers should focus more on generating products for the MENA region like Happy Oasis. With growing economies in the region, social gaming looks more promising than ever before. Before I end, I will leave you with this. Only 37% of Facebook users in the MENA region are female – a smaller percentage compared to the 56% in the United States. The difference in these numbers can be explained by the views of gender roles between the two cultures, which leads me to my final comment for developers.
Restrictions have recently been placed on bloggers in Saudi Arabia: Like the press in the country, online writers will have to obtain a press license to write. Do not be surprised if restrictions are placed on social gaming in the future, especially if developers begin to create games that may not sit well with the government in charge, but let’s take one step at a time.
CJ Arlotta covers the world of social gaming for development firms as well as the average consumer. Currently, he is accumulating more knowledge of the international gaming market to follow and understand what global developers may need to compete with already striving markets.
After a year of non stop hype stoked by events like the recent50 billion valuation after a 500 million dollar investment fromGoldman Sachs, there will be very few people on the planet who have not heard about Facebook.
Then there’s Zynga, the company that creates social games built on top of the Facebook platform, which has comparatively been flying under the radar apart from in tech circles. Even though Zynga produces popular games like Farmville, Cityville and Mafia Wars, the parent company Zynga has been more focused on generating huge amounts of revenue rather than generating the sort of mainstream press Facebook have been getting.
The two companies are intrinsically linked but who needs who more and could they live without each other?
Facebook Revenues
The big question I have is just how much of Facebook’s revenues are coming from social gaming? Zynga may be the biggest Facebook advertiser and that is not something that they can take lightly. The fact that Facebook doesn’t have to reveal its revenue sources is a good thing for them because if it was a case of Facebook getting 50 or 60% of their total revenues from social gaming that is something that could influence their valuation negatively. I believe social gaming makes up a huge part of Facebook’s revenues although they have made massive strides in other areas to open up parts of their advertising platform to brands and decrease their over dependency on social gaming.
Zynga Helps Skew Facebook’s Numbers
The amount of time that people spend on Facebook every day is a great number to roll out to advertisers, but n.b.- that number is massively skewed by the 100s of millions playing social games for hours on end pushing up those average times.
Similar Investors
The companies have a lot of ties that link them together behind the scenes. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus was a very early investor in Facebook which has probably given him insight into where the company is headed from a strategic level. More importantly, both companies have very significant backing from Digital Sky Partners, the Russian investment firm, which means that they should have a common vision or at the very least a mediator to keep calm heads if things get ugly.
Could Zynga Go It Alone?
There have been a few behind the scenes rows like when Facebook put pressure on Zynga last year to start using its Facebook credit system. Zynga essentially sells virtual currency which costs little or nothing to produce and is nearly all profit. Introducing Facebook credits for its users means Zynga would be paying Facebook a 30% tax for using its platform, which Zynga thinks is unfair. It is however a fair price that is applied evenly across its entire platform and it’s a small price to pay in the long run for tapping into a community of over 600 million users.
Google Gaming Platform?
Things get slightly more complicated when you take into account that Google invested a couple hundred million into Zynga last summer and has plans to set up its own social gaming platform. It makes sense for Google to get into social gaming as a step to combat Facebook but the launch was meant to happen in 2010 and nothing has happened yet. You can expect that it has been pushed out to the middle of 2011 like the rest of Google’s +1 social networking strategies. If Google does enter the market in a serious way it will give Zynga an interesting alternative to Facebook’s platform but it all depends on the social networking capabilities that are built in and that is something that Google has not been good at in the past.
Better The Devil You Know
Facebook could live without Zynga. It would suffer a major blip in revenues if Zynga pulled out tomorrow but somebody else would move in, replicate the games and be willing to pay the percentage on credits. It hurts Zynga to pay such a large portion of its revenues over to Facebook but it’ll never find a better platform for fast growth. There are huge amounts of money involved and greed could see these bedfellows fall out at some stage but I’d imagine because they have similar investors, are both huge unstoppable juggernauts and are both headed for IPO that they’ll continue to live together and enjoy huge success.
CityVille, the latest game from the largest Facebook game makerZynga, has reached 100 million monthly active users, according to the stats on CityVille’s Facebook page.
AppData, a site that specializes in Facebook app metrics, hasCityVille at 99.9 million monthly active users, but since (by AppData’s count) CityVille has been adding nearly 400,000 new monthly active users every day, the 100 million MAU milestone will surely be reached in the next update.
The success of CityVille has been meteoric and has totally eclipsedFarmVille, an earlier Zynga title that reigned supreme over the world of Facebook games for more than a year. It took CityVille less than a month to surpass FarmVille in terms of both daily and monthly active users, and it took less than 40 days for it to reach 100 million users.
Zynga’s apps still rule AppData’s leaderboard, holding four of the top five spots, but CityVille’s success is unmatched. It seems that Zynga has another huge winner on its hands. The only question now is: how big canCityVille get?
Casual game developer OMGPOP has raised close to $10M in its second round of funding led by Rho Ventures, Japan’s Softbank, Spark Capital and others. More after the jump.
The company started as a flash web game portal with social twists. As a social networking site, OMGPOP eventually diversified into game development – creating high quality games and becoming a true casual multiplayer gaming destination. OMGPOP primarily derives revenues from ads and virtual currency sales but has been focusing strongly on partnerships as well, securing IMVU and myYearbook as places to seed their games. OMGPOP wasn’t too eager on distributing its games on third party platforms like Facebook but they know better than to ignore it.
OMGPOP released CupCake Corner on Facebook – a restaurant management game that came in to fruition as a result of a lot of market research. Most of the research was in the form of asking people on Facebook using fb ad campaigns. The game now has over 1.6 MMAUs and experiencing growth of nearly 50,000 new users a day. OMGPOP is poised on developing quality games that have higher engagement and we hope they achieve just that.
According to a report by Paidcontent, OMGPOP will be using the new funding to expand its game library and is currently preparing to launch five games for Facebook and iPhone over the next 6 months as well as acquire smaller studios. The company raised $5M last time in a round led by Bessemeber Ventures in March 2009. One of the investors now is Rho Ventures – which also participated in Tapjoy’s latest round of financing.
Another week brings another round of applications that are topping our weekly growth leaderboard. We see a few new additions to the fastest growing list this week, including a popular childhood character that has found his way onto Facebook. Zynga’s CityVille continues to dominate our list for another week, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Take a moment to look over all of the top applications on Facebook here, or proceed directly to this week’s list belo
CityVille
Zynga’s CityVille remains number one on our list once again after launching barely a month ago. An astounding 15,686,335 Facebook gamers added the application over the past seven days. In case you are one of the few that have not started playing yet, design your own city from the ground up in the game. Invite your friends to the application, and show off your brand new town when you are finished. Join the masses that are playing CityVille on Facebook.
Well, social media marketing. Fewer things are so lavishly spent on, yet so poorly measured.
Here are a few predictions for 2011 related to where the smart money and dumb money will go. Special thanks to a number of high-volume retail experts for their insights, including Ryan Holiday, director of marketing at American Apparel.
Read on for our predictions and let us know in the comments what you think social media marketing will look like in the year to come.
1. YouTube Beats Yahoo — Video Will Convert
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the English-speaking world.
That’s right: YouTube is bigger than Yahoo. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. When I look at the traffic sources for my book trailer on YouTube, the biggest referrer isn’t my own blog. It’s The Huffington Post. I customized the video and text content to a niche (but sizeable) outlet that didn’t exist two years ago:Huffington Post Books.
With proper targeting and syndication, this 50 second video almost immediately propelled my book from an Amazon rank of approximately number 150 to 30, now stabilizing at number four in all books. We usedRankForest to track this sudden change.
The 50-second length was deliberate and was also later edited to 30 seconds for in-video advertising on YouTube.
At least 30% off all the video views (more than 6.3 million) on my main YouTube channel come from search or organic referrals. By putting up videos, particularly on YouTube, you open up a whole channel for sharing and connecting to the biggest word-of-mouth platform in the English language.
2. The Full Resurrection of E-mail
Groupon has an e-mail list of at least 15 million strong in the U.S. (the company says it’s 30+ million if you include international), which goes to show that a true permission asset can be worth nearly $6 billion on the bidding table.
E-mail addresses are a safer long-term investment than social media features. Think about all the money companies spent advertising their MySpace pages in 2007. Even on Facebook, your direct messages to fans are relegated to a second tier inbox no one reads. This is something you don’t have to worry about happening in e-mail marketing. Among 20- to 35-year olds, at least, their physical addresses change more frequently than their e-mail addresses.
The smarter marketers will budget “social media” acquisitions based on lifetime value (or a set duration, like 6 months’ retail purchases) of e-mail addresses.
One major retailer did the math and learned that an e-mail subscriber is worth roughly $20 a year in annual online revenue. Knowing this number allowed the retailer to:
Calculate the value of the real estate it gives the e-mail signup box at the register in stores. It turns out to be one of the most lucrative converters in an already competitive area.
Easily say “Yes” or “No” to requests to participate in contests/sweepstakes by judging return on new e-mails acquired.
Calculate what the company can spend to build its list.
There are companies like Opt-Intelligence that can be paid a CPA (cost per action) for what are called “co-regs.” Co-reg example: If you’re signing up for an account at NYTimes.com, and it says “Get 4 issues of Golf Magazine FREE!” someone paid for that because they knew it will make money based on lifetime value.
After the above-mentioned retailer quantified what an e-mail subscriber was worth, the company was able to double its subscriber base in less than eight months. The majority of that growth came not through spending money upfront, but from the redirection of already existing resources in ways that weren’t possible before calculating that number. Let’s say that added 500,000 e-mail addresses, each worth $20 in 2011; that means an additional $10 million in revenue with no significant capital outlay.
Aaron Ray uses the same tactics for the “free agent bands” (major acts who’ve left a label) at The Collective. He figures out how many tickets you sell through your fan club, how many downloads come from your e-mail list, and how much traffic you can drive through Facebook and Twitter. It’s critical for two reasons: 1) For accurate revenue/sales/attendance predictions, and 2) As ROI metrics to justify investments for growth.
This also allows loss-leader campaigns. Even if the math on a Groupon deal is razor thin, a smart retailer (online or offline) can acquire e-mails through a special form they set up and add an extra $20+ per transaction, per our hypothetical example.
Many companies can afford to give product away for “free” if they have the right metrics. Most companies don’t, which leads us to number three.
3. Large Companies Will Waste Money on Vanity Metrics
There’s a difference between “actionable” and “vanity” metrics. Just because your competitors are onFoursquare doesn’t mean that you should be. Could it make sense? Sure, but you should run the numbers — the right numbers. Impressions, page views, and undefined terms like “engagement” are at best gameable and at worst meaningless. Some social media consultancies define their success metrics well (including, in rare cases, “engagement”), but beware the services that don’t. Remember that those who got rich in the gold rush weren’t panning for gold; they were selling pick axes. Apple isn’t chasing Facebook updates, and Steve Jobs isn’t worried about getting blog posts up before noon. Apple’s doing just fine, as are many companies quietly focusing on the tools they know best.
“Actionable” need not be expensive. The conversion from SlideShare to purchase from my WordPress blog, both of which were free, helped me to sell more than 4,000 books on Amazon in less than 12 hours. If you’re spending more than $5,000 per month for insight, make sure you’re getting actionable data that you can at least correlate to sales.
Much of social media is trackable, despite the noise. Don’t get tricked with new lingo or you’ll end up with an embarrassing motto straight from here.
4. Ads & Conversation Will Impact Different Conversion Rates
I recall once seeing a Zynga billboard while driving up the 280-N from the San Francisco airport to downtown San Francisco. There was no tagline, and I joked to my passenger, who was in the financing and IPO business: “I’m not sure who that’s intended to sell.”
He laughed and responded with “Dude, that’s not for end users. That’s to get the attention of the bankers driving from SFO to downtown.”
Remember, you can have multiple audiences for your ads. At American Apparel, many of its best known ads ran in obscure publications or in short bursts on niche websites. Millions of people know about them, however, because blogs thought they were so interesting that they wrote articles about them.
In that case, the press was the audience and the public only indirectly so. The public was a later side effect, but not the first target. One good test of whether your advertising can become a conversation: Would people notice if your ads stopped running? Clickthrough rate is not going to answer that question.
This is why advertisers should start monitoring chatter about their content and come up with ways to track and value that. You also need be able to think big picture so you can know that sometimes negative chatter is still a good thing (it means people get emotional about what you do).
Does this violate the actionable metric rule in my third point? Not at all. It’s another feedback loop and easily measurable, whether in press mentions (including blogs) specific to an ad, or even product development impact.
For developing product, Amazon is well known for “working backward” from internal press-release response. That is, it starts with the reaction or response from its intended audience and designs its advertising messages — or products — backward from there. Google also used this approach by launching Google News without chronological or geographic filtering, only afterward responding to requests and implementing the chronological feature. There was a ton of debate and fighting internally for both features, and they let the market decide.
“Listening” isn’t enough. Tracking the number of Twitter mentions tells you nothing. The bigger question is: What are we trying to build or accomplish, and how will we digest and use this data?
If you nail that, you can nail your competition to the wall. They’ll be too busy chasing the latest shiny web service.
First reported the other day on Social Times,CityVille was on its way to dethrone FarmVille as the biggest game on Facebook. As we all wake up to do our last minute Christmas shopping, CityVillesurpassing FarmVille is probably the last thing from our mind, but I’m proud to report that CityVille has now taken the throne.
According to AllFacebook.com, CityVille surpassed FarmVille by about 5 million monthly active users (MAU) this morning. CityVille, with now a daily growth of about 7 million users, has established itself once again in the social gaming world after its launch in early December. On the day of CityVille’s launch, over 290,000 gamers were attracted to CityVille, making CityVille the largest launch ever inZynga‘s history.
CityVille, with now over 61.6 million monthly activeusers, currently has a weekly growth of 23 million users with a base of 16.7 million daily active users.
FarmVille, with 16.3 million daily active users, is not far behind CityVille with regards to daily active users. FarmVille’s Continue Reading
Digital Chocolate is a Facebook developer that keeps churning out bright and fun Flash games like it’s going out of business! One of their newest additions, Millionaire, is a game that lets players play out one of their fantasies: being a millionaire!
In the game, the players get to plan what the city is going to look like, how the businesses are going to be placed, how the city will be decorated and what contracts you’re going to fulfill. The last part – fulfilling contracts – is one of the most important aspects of gameplay in Millionaire City. Although city planningshouldn’t be forgotten, it’s not the focus as it would be in other city simulation games.
But, as the title suggests, you are a millionaire. You have a development firm and your primary goal should be to build up this development firm up into a multi-billion dollar corporation.
So basically when you play Millionaire City, focus on this: rental properties. Once you finish the tutorial, you’ll be able to build almost any kind of house that you please. For each of these houses, you can rent it out to a tenant for a certain period of time. The shorter leases earn more money (but are riskier since you’ll have to find tenants more often) and the longer leases tend to be more convenient.
If you don’t remember to check Millionaire City often to collect the rent on time, your renters will abandon the property and this will cost you money. If you tire of the rental business, you can also earn money by building up your businesses as you level up. The businesses generate money every few minutes at a rate based on how many people live within a business’s region.
This is helpful, because it lets your rental properties and businesses have a symbiotic relationship; they help each other. So the more rental properties that you manage, the better your businesses will do! You can also boost rent and earn more from your rental properties in Millionaire City by decorating the area. The bonuses in the game are cumulative; so make sure to design your city to where there are lots of trees and decorations by your rental properties!
Now that you’re in the development firm owner state of mind – have fun in Millionaire City!
Making Millionaire City Organized for Maximum Profitability
Unless you plan your city layout properly in Millionaire City, you’re not going to maximize your earnings. If you want to increase your net worth quicker and have your city planning be beneficial long term, follow a few rules:
Before you build, organize your city’s theme by renaming your city. Your advisor gives you a mission to change its name from Chocolate Fields; however, you can only do this once so make sure to give it some thought before you do it!
Plan by Building Roads
Building roads is free, so you may be tempted to build them early on and by the bucketload. This may not be wise to do. In Millionaire City, it’s all about planning. So if you want to build roads, make sure they are in accordance to your future city planning.
Organize Millionaire City
Look at the available houses that you have and look at how much land you’ll need to build them. You can then look at your commercial buildings and do the same. Now, find a commercial building and put it in the center of the available area; when you build your houses, make sure to surround the commercial building. The more tenants you have near your businesses, the better the businesses will do.
Remember to Decorate – But do it Last
Decorating plays a key role in determining how high rent is, so don’t forget to do it. However, what is most important is fitting in as many houses and commercial buildings as you can. So leave a little bit of space for decorations, but make sure to do it last.
Using the Millionaire City Destroy Tool
The Destroy tool should be used only for decorations. But if you do need to use it on buildings, don’t use it on high valued buildings. If you need to make room and earn cash, only Destroy bungalows.
Things get slightly more complicated when you take into account that Google invested a couple hundred million into Zynga last summer and has plans to set up its own social gaming platform. It makes sense for Google to get into social gaming as a step to combat Facebook but the launch was meant to happen in 2010 and nothing has happened yet. You can expect that it has been pushed out to the middle of 2011 like the rest of Google’s +1 social networking strategies. If Google does enter the market in a serious way it will give Zynga an interesting alternative to Facebook’s platform but it all depends on the social networking capabilities that are built in and that is something that Google has not been good at in the past.
