What Makes Facebook Social Games So Popular? If you’re a regular Facebook user, odds are that you’ve gotten requests to help someone get an item for their farm or city, to play Words with Friends with them, or something like that. Social games are very popular on Facebook – and it isn’t just the kids who are playing them. This infographic addresses the sheer volume of people who play these social games, and the results of their vigorous game playing. Top 10 Facebook Social Games* Gardens of Time – 7,400,000 monthly active users The SIMS Social – 24,300,000 monthly active users CityVille – 49,300,000 monthly active users Double Down Casino – 4,700,000 monthly active users Adventure World – 9,200,000 monthly active users Words with Friends – 16,600,000 monthly active users Bingo Blitz – 2,800,000 monthly active users Empires & Allies – no data on monthly active users Slotomania – 5,400,000 monthly active users Diamond Dash – 12,500,000 monthly active users *these games are rated in order of user satisfaction scores from Facebook On the Rise.
OMGPOP Draws Zynga’s Daily User Traffic Up By 25% As the dust settles after Zynga’s purchase of New York mobile social game developer OMGPOP, the company is visibly taking on a new shape. A 25% larger and more mobile one. That’s the percentage growth of its total daily active user base, when you add in the 14.6 million people playing mobile sketching app Draw Something to its existing 55 million players. The game has gone from 1.7 million to 14.6 over the month of March, based on app tracking service AppData. Today, it’s nearly the combined size of Zynga’s two biggest hits on Facebook, CityVille and Texas Hold’em Poker.
Which means Draw Something’s share of the market is likely to grow in the coming months. Draw Something is a blank slate. The user count comes with a caveat here. The big long-term potential isn’t just that Zynga has all these users from this game. The $210 million bet on OMGPOP has the obvious risks, too. The Legal Madness Around NCAA Bracket Pools. In 1996, Chris Hehman built one of the first online bracket managers for the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, or March Madness, as it’s known to the millions of Americans who gamble on it every year. Hehman’s boss at the now defunct telecom company Nortel Networks wanted a better way to keep track of the 50-odd entries in the annual office pool. “Fifty doesn’t seem like a large number now,” says Hehman, “but back then you had to print it all and mark up all of the results and score them by hand.”
Hehman’s program was such an office hit that he turned it into a business, PickHoops, which now processes 180,000 brackets annually. PickHoops isn’t the only, or even the biggest, online bracket manager. Its volume is nowhere near the 5.9 million brackets filled out on ESPN’s free service or the 4.5 million at CBS Sports. All of them provide a place for the members of a pool to enter their picks, and the programs keep score as teams are eliminated from the tourney. Sports-Social-Media-Infographic-GMR-Marketing.jpg (800×1638) 7 Dimensions of Facebook Commerce. Social commerce is estimated to reach $30 Billion (yes, that’s Billion with a ‘B’) in the next 5 years.
How is that possible? Facebook Commerce is more than just Liking product pages. There are 7 dimensions driving Facebook Commerce that make up the “F-Commerce Ecosphere,” as shared by Janice Diner, founding partner of Horizon Studios, a social media consultancy at the Meshwest conferencethis week in Vancouver, BC. The F-Commerce Ecosphere Commerce Inside Facebook.com F-stores Since the first in-Facebook retail transaction in 2009, many e-businesses have launched their own Shop tabs on their Facebook Pages that either redirect to their website or support real-money shopping right on the Page.
Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories Ads and Sponsored Stories are advertising options, messages appear in the sidebar and in the News Feed. Facebook Credits Considering Zynga sells 38,000 virtual items every second, this stuff is pretty popular with consumers. Open Graph Facebook Commerce. Rewarding Users. While our policies prohibit directly tying incentives to the use of our Social Channels, e.g. rewarding users for the sole act of posting a Stream stories or sending a Request, we do allow for referral-based rewards where our Social Channels are indirectly tied to the potential in-app reward.
For example, you can reward users based on the number of friends that accept the user’s invitation to your app. In the example below, note that the user does not get a reward for the act of sending the invitation, but instead has the potential to earn rewards if the user has friends who accept the invitation. Like Button - Rewarding Fans We also allow for specific rewarding around the Like button, provided the incentive is open to all new and existing users who Like your Page. Some common rewards for all users who Like your Page include the following: Coupons/RebatesExclusive ContentEligibility to Enter a PromotionDonating to a Charity Based on Number of Page Likes.
How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012: Social Content Curation As The Next Big Thing. The most interesting wave hitting the social web in 2012 is social curation. This was kicked off in 2011 as Pinterest's growth was noticed by Silicon Valley and a number of companies quickly followed suit - Snip.It launched as a social information curation platform, Quora adopted boards for a similar purpose, and Fab.com launched a structured social commerce feed. In this blog post I will discuss the evolution of social media from long-form to push-button, the emergence of social curation on sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, and the move to structured sets of curated content on Pinterest and its brethren.
But first, the meta-trend.... ...Social Media: Evolving From Long Form To Push Button In the evolution of social media over the last decade, the trend has been a move from long form content, which has high friction of participation (both on the production and consumption side) to ever lower requirements placed on a user to participate in a conversation. Patent US20060287094 - Methods and systems for betting with ... - Google Patents. 1. Field of the Invention The subject disclosure relates to methods and systems for gaining technology in a distributed computing network, and more particularly to improved methods and systems for betting with pari-mutuel payouts while utilizing the real-time capabilities of a distributed computing network. 2.
Background of the Related Art Bookmaking is the practice of gambling on sporting events. Bookmaking usually pits the bookie against all bettors. Cooperative wagering or pari-mutuel betting is a certain type of bookmaking. In pari-mutuel systems, the holders of winning tickets divide the total amount of money bet on a race (the “pool”), after deductions for tax and house expenses (the “fixed profit”).
The large amount of calculation involved in pari-mutuel gambling led to invention of a specialized mechanical calculating machine known as a “totalisator” or “tote board”. The science of determining the outcome of a race is called handicapping. Bringing Social App Discovery to Mobile. Today, we are extending Facebook Platform on mobile, bringing all the social channels that have helped apps and games reach hundreds of millions of users on the Web to mobile apps and websites.
You can now easily reach the 350 million people who use Facebook every month on a mobile device, including iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and our mobile web site. We are at the beginning of bringing Facebook Platform apps to mobile. The features we are launching today are still under development. They will evolve as we learn more about building richer social experiences on mobile devices.
Social Channels on Mobile Social channels like Bookmarks, Requests, and News Feed drive the discovery and distribution of apps using Facebook Platform. Bookmarks Bookmarks are one of the key re-engagement channels for Apps on Facebook. Now, people who use Facebook on the iPhone, the iPad, and the mobile web site (m.facebook.com), will get bookmarks to the mobile versions of these apps.
Requests News Feed Facebook Credits. 300m Users Access Facebook Via Its Mobile Apps. 29 December '11, 11:36am Follow Christmas gadget gifting appears to have boosted Facebook app use, with it being reported in the last couple of days the world’s largest social network saw monthly active users of its mobile apps pass 300 million users.
Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans writes that the figure is correct as of 27 December, with iOS and Android applications accounting for more than two-thirds of mobile app use on the social network. Evans uses Facebook’s own mobile data, comparing iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian and featurephone use, to the network’s 800 million total users and 350 million mobile users, which the company announced at the end of September. Evans writes: Quite unsurprisingly, these are dominated by the two platforms that have traction, iOS and Android. 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number. I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.
“No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” — cmdrtaco, Slashdot.org, 2001, reviewing the first iPod I remember my first 1G iPhone. Now, the crazy thing about that release is when the original iPhone went public, flaws and all, you know that in a secret room somewhere on Apple’s campus they had a working prototype of the 3GS with a faster processor, better battery life, normal headphone jack… a perfect everything. “$400 for an Mp3 Player! Or, I wonder, are they really quite zen about the whole thing? What killed us was “one more thing.” “hey – heres an idea Apple – rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up?
A beautiful thing about Apple is how quickly they obsolete their own products. Usage is like oxygen for ideas. “Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs, 1983 Like this: Related. The metrics are the message: how analytics is shaping social games | Technology. Picture this. You're deeply engaged in one of the many free-to-play adventure games available online, when you decide to buy a bigger sword. It could be that you made the tactical decision to extend your armoury, or that you panicked when you spotted a gigantic dragon lumbering in your direction; you might not even know why you did it. You just fancied a bigger sword. But that action took you into the barely two percent of free-to-play gamers who actually pay for content – and the game makers want to know why. The freemium gaming business is expanding rapidly. We all know about the Facebook behemoth Zynga, which now claims over 250 million monthly players, and is valued at anywhere between $5-10bn.
But online, there are dozens of global companies hawking a range of in-depth gaming experiences. And what the big players have learned is that coming up with a great game concept is only the beginning. Alan Miller has been in the games business for over 30 years. It's a strange business. How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use. Zynga IPO Filing Shows Flat User Growth, Booming Revenue. Zynga's impressive stats are part of the reason for its sky-high valuation. With 232 million monthly active users and $597 million in revenue last year alone, it's no surprise that so many people are interested in getting a piece of the action. But when we dug into Zynga's nearly 200-page S-1 filing, we found a more complicated picture. Zynga's user base hasn't grown in the last year, for example, but its revenue has skyrocketed. 1.
How Zynga grew from gaming outcast to $9 billion social game powerhouse. Update: This article is now available as a 63-page e-book on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. Zynga has turned the video game world upside down in its short five-year history. As it’s poised on the verge of a massive initial public offering, the social game startup is now one of gaming’s great success stories. But its success was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, most game industry veterans didn’t view it as a real game company. Mark Pincus was a four-time entrepreneur, but had no experience in the game industry and had never managed a big company.
He was the most unlikely entrepreneur to create a game industry giant. Now Pincus is set to become a multibillionaire as the largest shareholder in a company that is about to hold on Thursday one of the biggest initial public offerings of the year. And it is possible in no small part because Pincus, the gaming novice, dreamed bigger than the game industry when it came to giving users accessible and social games, anytime, anywhere. Real Money for Virtual Coin. “Virtual goods” are imaginary playthings that exist only inside computer games. But their rising popularity is creating billions of dollars in very weal wealth and might even establish a beachhead for a new payment system for physical goods. Different kinds of virtual goods are available in different types of games. Role-playing adventure games might offer shields and swords; a car game might have new racing courses for sale.
The research firm In-Stat projects that the global market for such goods will be over $14.6 billion by 2014, more than double its 2010 value. Virtual goods first became widely known about a decade ago in the online virtual-reality platform Second Life. Players could buy new clothes, hairdos, and other accessories for the avatars that they controlled in the virtual landscape. The poster child of this new market is Zynga, the San Francisco company behind FarmVille and other popular games. See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Business of Games. @ Social Gaming Summit – What I Learned — David Eckoff blog. How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way. On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009.
Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later. Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don’t. Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. Backing out of Compete’s numbers, we see Pinterest grew about 50% month over month from a base of zero since its inception (on average, smoothing the curve). Note these numbers are approximations and also do not count the significant traffic the service sees from mobile (Pinterest’s app currently takes the #6 social spot in the iTunes store).
PHP Pick 'Em - Free PHP Football Pool. Survey: Online social games drawing bigger crowd. Cameron Payne. What To Look For In A Technical Co-Founder. Inside Social Games · An In-Depth Look at the Social Gaming Industry’s Performance and Prospects on Facebook. Does CentSports Engage in Illegal Bookmaking? « Seattle Entertainment and Trademark Lawyer Blog. A Legal Alternative To Online Gambling - Forbes.com. Why Zynga's Mark Pincus Tried To Buy CNet [Startup School] Greg Frame. Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston. Stock Market Game - Practice investing $1,000,000 - UpDown.com. Centsports. Gambling Law US - State Gambling Laws United States. Www.virtualworldlaw.com/Virtual Currency.pdf.
Could social gaming run afoul of gambling laws?