Tag Archives: Facebook

Social games, virtual goods, and monetization opportunities: Part 3

Nov
30

This is Part 3 of a series by Uzi Arbiv, Director of Sales for the performance marketing arm of Adsmarket.

In Part One of this post I commented on the current casual gaming climate, and ended with the question, “What should developers and games creators understand to stand out in the industry?”

In Part Two, I outlined the essentials and a check list for monetizing a social game.

In Part Three, we’ll discuss user acquisition through in-house marketing campaigns, Cost Per Install, and alternative monetization platforms.

Let’s start with Facebook Ads. Running an online campaign on Facebook is not a complex task and most companies do it in-house.  This way, you have full control over the cost, targeting and time frame.  You can pay-per-click or impression; appear on Facebook ads/flyers or within other applications’ media spots.  To learn about how to advertise on Facebook, there are so many resources it would be ridiculous to advise on the best one.  Here’s what FB says.

 

Working via CPI (cost per install) can be a bigger challenge but with the right fine tuning you can get better results and focus your efforts on the important part of this business – up selling.  You might pay a higher rate per install; however, you will be exposed to various affiliates and media channels that will be most likely to generate higher average revenue per user.

In some cases these affiliates are local providers in the region you wish to target with better understanding and connections to Facebook and better targeting capabilities.  Working on a performance-based level is preferred as you only pay for results.  It is worth trying and most companies are already using this method.

Virtual goods can also increase user acquisition while monetizing your traffic: simply have your game/application showings on whatever alternative payment solutions platform you use. Just like everything in our world, you simply need to know how to process this channel and more important, how to price it.  Check out Adsmarket Group member Matomy, provider of alternative payment solutions.

In short, a production house needs to understand fellow gamers, marketing and online media and be able to implement all three. A solid game backed up with a strong understanding of media and monetization is the main difference between a company such as Zynga and a company that looking for Zynga to acquire it…

Author Uzi Arbiv is the Director of Sales for the performance marketing arm of Adsmarket. You can contact him at uzi.a@adsmarket.com

 

See Uzi’s other posts:

Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications

Social Games, Virtual Goods, and Monetization Opportunities: a 3-part series with Uzi Arbiv

Social games, virtual goods, and monetization opportunities: Part 2

Nov
22

In Part One of this post I commented on the current casual gaming climate, and ended with the question, “What should developers and games creators understand to stand out in the industry?”

For games companies, subscription models and boxed set goods are still generating a great amount of revenue; however, most companies know that they must create a social version of their product otherwise it may simply vanish.

Moreover, let’s say your game is social media friendly, but you aren’t monetizing.  Some would say that if you have a great product but nobody is buying it then you are missing the whole point.

How else can you explain the ongoing performance and revenue for some of the top Farm/Poker/Mafia games on Facebook?  Is it coincident?  Timing? Or maybe they are just lucky? Not at all. These casual gaming heavy-hitters understand fellow gamers, marketing and online media and can implement all three to form the answer:  great content, combined with a sharp user flow.

The best games are built to motivate their users like a good coach, who reminds you that you are good, but not excellent!  Users increase their playing prowess and their chance to lead their group by purchasing credits for 5, 10, or 15 bucks a pop, an affordable ego boost.  Competitive players who enjoy facing off with their friends love this model.

The challenge is to build the game right in order to maximize your ongoing cost and user value.

So here is our check list for now:

  • Create a cool game in terms: animation, story line, features & sophistication.
  • Provide a supporting platform/ technology (unless your users will enjoy maintenance/downtime notices)
  • Come up with the right marketing strategy and the ability to analyze your results
  • Funds (don’t spend it all in one place ;-)
  • Acquire users via in-house marketing campaigns, Cost Per Install, and alternative monetization platforms.

Part 3 will cover user acquisition through in-house marketing campaigns, Cost Per Install, and alternative monetization platforms.

Author Uzi Arbiv is the Director of Sales for the performance marketing arm of Adsmarket. You can contact him at uzi.a@adsmarket.com

See Uzi’s other posts:

Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications

Social Games, Virtual Goods, and Monetization Opportunities: a 3-part series with Uzi Arbiv

Social games, virtual goods, and monetization opportunities: 3-part series with Uzi Arbiv

Nov
17

This is a 3-part series about social games, virtual goods, and monetization opportunities.

Part 1 comments on the current casual gaming climate
Part 2 will outline the essentials and a check list for monetizing a social game
Part 3 will discuss user acquisition through in-house marketing campaigns, Cost Per Install, and alternative monetization platforms.

Part One:

So, how many applications do you already have on your Facebook profile?

Here is the average check list:
One farm, a dance club, gun collection, possibly a restaurant, a football team, an empire and the list just goes on and on.

According to AppData.com, if you add up the amount of monthly active users of the top 10 Facebook developers’ apps you will hit a staggering 533,736,605 users.
This number is even more significant when you consider the potential of additional studios and game developers that grow their activity everyday on Facebook.

Each month these users log in, play, and share games with their friends. Moreover – they purchase virtual goods.

For me, 2010 will be remembered for officially creating an additional niche within the online games world – Social games is officially head-to-head with MMO’s (massively multiplayer online games)  and casual/skill games.

Who is the big winner here?  The virtual goods players.

How can we tell?  Here are some observations of the casual gaming industry’s huge influence:

Lingo: ARPU (average revenue per user), social media, LTV (lifetime value), CPI (cost per install)… No longer buzzwords, they are being implemented into new start-ups as well as established business models.

FB: The huge migrations onto Facebook strengthen two main and somewhat obvious factors:

Acquisitions: We are witnessing the ongoing acquisitions of gaming studios and developers for hundreds of millions of dollars, with the main goal being better games and an interactive and localized user experience, creating a feeling of true value for the users (which leads to spending).

Appeal to Users: As a result of the recent growth in the social gaming arena, users can find relevant and intriguing games easily.

So I leave you with the question: “What must game developers and games creators understand to stand out in the industry?”

In Part Two, I will outline the essentials and a check list for monetizing a social game.

Author Uzi Arbiv is the Director of Sales for the performance marketing arm of Adsmarket.  You can contact him at uzi.a@adsmarket.com

See Uzi’s other post:

Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications

Ofer Druker: Facebook has not reached its potential for affiliate marketers yet…

Feb
28

Adsmarket CEO Ofer Druker‘s indicates that Facebook became a major source of media for performance advertising  and  predicts Facebook will take a bigger share in the coming 12-24 months:

On Feb 22nd and 23rd , 2010, the Israel Internet Association presented Web ’10, its 14th annual conference, held at the Avenue Conventions and Events Center near Ben-Gurion Air-Port just outside Tel Aviv, where Adsmarket is located.  As CEO of Adsmarket, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion: Creative Money – New and Innovative Business Model for the Web and Mobile on Day 1 of the conference.

I was asked about trends that I had witnessed in Adsmarket and in online advertising in 2009.  I should point out that affiliate marketing can be a volatile and fickle business, especially with 2009′s ups and downs in online advertising (See my 2009 Year-End Post) We know that as a performance-based affiliate network, 2010 will be Adsmarket’s best year yet, as we are investing more and more into developing the best product out there for affiliates, and the best platform for affiliate program management, as well as expanding our business in the US and Spain/LATAM.

In answering the question about trends I witnessed in 2009, I said then and I say now that Facebook is continually gaining a larger influence, and is significantly contributing  to online media and performance marketing.  Proving this,iIn the past 18 months or so we’ve witnessed enormous growth in the results and traffic we are getting from Facebook related media.  If, 2 years ago, a main source of media was Google, the pendulum is now its swinging to Facebook; their reach is growing that fast.  We expect that this trend will continue, with users on Facebook rounding 1 Billion sometime by the end  of 2011.

It will be the challenge of every affiliate network to accommodate this growth, and we expect to meet the needs of Facebook affiliates and advertisers head-on.

Facebook Privacy Settings Not to be Overlooked

Jan
25

Back in December 2009, Facebook changed their default privacy settings for users, pretty much revealing someone’s entire profile: photos, information, contact information, friends, etc. to the universe, including major search engines.  At the same time and throughout January, they announced the change on the site at the point of login, and users were given the option to change these defaults to protect their privacy.  But, how many of us actually did it?  Unless you log in to the site frequently, you might not have known about the changes for days, weeks, or months ( not that this would be an issue with Facebook marketers and affiliates who are hooked up to the site by IV…) and even frequent FBers are so used to seeing little banners and extra information that you might just ignore it.

Opening up Facebook in this way seems to be another wave in the current tide of making the web more transparent. Twitter’s power for marketers is based on it, and this change from FB is probably just a follow-suit move to cater to their advertisers, though how it will affect their total revenue remains to be seen.

Getting back to how this all affects us, the general Facebook community, Sarah Perez of The New York Times made some recommendations for protecting your privacy on Facebook, and here is her shortlist of the 3 most important profile items you should think about protecting:

1. Decide Who Can See The Things You Share (Status Updates, Photo, Videos, etc.)

If you accepted the new recommended settings then you voluntarily gave Facebook the right to share the information about the items you post with any user or application on the site. Depending on your search settings, you may have also given Facebook the right to share that information with search engines, too.

2. Decide Who Can See Your Personal Info

Facebook has a section of your profile called “personal info,” but it only includes your interests, activities, and favorites. Other arguably more personal information is not encompassed by the “personal info” setting on Facebook’s Privacy Settings page. That other information includes things like your birthday, your religious and political views, and your relationship status.

After last month’s privacy changes, Facebook set the new defaults for this other information to viewable by either “Everyone” (for family and relationships, aka relationship status) or to “Friends of Friends” (birthday, religious and political views). Depending on your own preferences, you can update each of these fields as you see fit. However, we would bet that many will want to set these to “Only Friends” as well.

3. What Google Can See – Keep Your Data Off the Search Engines

When you visit Facebook’s Search Settings page, a warning message pops up. Apparently, Facebook wants to clear the air about what info is being indexed by Google. The message reads:

“There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.”

While that may be true to a point, the second setting listed on this Search Settings page refers to exactly what you’re allowing Google to index. If the box next to “Allow” is checked, you’re giving search engines the ability to access and index any information you’ve marked as visible by “Everyone.” As you can see from the settings discussed above, if you had not made some changes to certain fields, you would be sharing quite a bit with the search engines…probably more information than you were comfortable with.

As an affiliate network with a significant portion of business in Facebook and Social Media, we strive to uphold the quality of affiliate activity in this area.   Part of that quality is an ethical commitment to the users on behalf of our advertisers, and so we recommend that you take a few minutes to follow the steps outlined in this post to keep Facebook a happy place!

Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications

Oct
22

Virtual Currency Image courtesy of Inside Facebook

Adsmarket’s media activity with online games has been growing rapidly for the
past year. This is due to two main reasons:  

1. Great growth in this online field & user’s awareness.
2. A combined synergy between these applications & Affiliates/Publishers.

I wanted to share with you a fast-growing media channel that you MUST use or at
least try, for your upcoming campaign – Virtual Currency.  (If you don’t know much
about virtual currency yet, I won’t go into it here, but two sites I like explain it really
well. Click here or here.)

A lot of online games providers (either developers or publishers) have been offering
their users Virtual Currency because it is a simple and user-friendly way to spend
money online as a part of the gaming experience.  It is also a very targeted media
source, as many affiliates and publishers offer Virtual Currency to their users via
social media applications, MMO applications, portals, etc.

Many of my clients are resistant to opening their campaign to Virtual Currency, but
once they understand the potential for them the reservations become a thing of the
past.

No matter what kind of games you are promoting; Skill games, Casual Games,
MMO, MMORPG, virtual currency is a proven source of positive ROI.

You guys think I am just trying sell something? From Google:
 “Virtual Worlds Forecast to Grow at 23% through 2015 – Micro transactions
expected to grow to $17.3 billion by 2015.”
“While virtual goods have been driving revenues in Asia and Europe for
years, 2009 will be remembered as the year virtual goods-based businesses began to
scale in the United States. Virtual goods may be bringing the largest disruption
entertainment, communication, and e-commerce infrastructure companies have seen
for a long time.”

Now, tell me you don’t want some of that money in your pocket…
This is the perfect opportunity to be open to change, modify your business model, and make
more money!  I’ve learned time and time again how dynamic the online advertising industry is,
and it certainly pays to be flexible.  If you are not open to that, stop reading now. Otherwise,
let’s get down to business.

So, how can virtual currency contribute to your online campaigns? The answer is very simple: 
The right attitude and good campaign management, starting with knowing how to evaluate
your revenue stream. To calculate this you will simply need the data below (and a bit more)

  • Current number of active & paying users.
  • Average amount a user spends per country/application/game.
  • Amount paid to acquire new users – in terms of media buying & the above.
  • Conversion ratio from a registered user to a paying user. (as a unit of time)
  • Average user lifetime.

This data will show you a general picture regarding the revenue you are producing from the
campaign.

Case Study:

You have 10,000 registered users on your site, out of which 10% are a becoming  paying
users spending $1.00 per month (after an average of two months from the day they
registered).  Average user lifetime here is about 6 months.

If the above is correct, once the campaign is live two months from now, this site will
be generating 10K per month (not including media selling and other services etc) and
possibly more. What are our expenses using traditional media sources such as
Banners, Paid Search, or Pop up/under?  Costs can average around $1.00, if not
more.This is the point where added value of Virtual Currency kicks in:  higher
volumes with potential to increase your revenue.

Bottom Line:  Using Virtual Currency will provide you around 5%-3% in
terms of paying users – however, you will also pay half, if not less, per user. -

That’s an additional 3K-5K per month!

Look at your Facebook profile; how many kisses have you sent lately? How many

vegetables are you growing?  When was your last big win playing Texas holdem?  
Many of us are already a part of the virtual currency wave as participants.   Look
what may happen to Zynga! we can only learn and make more money!

Uzi Arbiv is a Senior Sales Representative at Adsmarket, specializing in the Online Games vertical. 

If you are an advertiser and would like more information, please contact him at uziATadsmarket.com.