Social Gold: How to Launch your own Currency. Virtual Currency Companies, Jambool, Super Rewards, Gwallet. Using Virtual Currency to Monetize. There's nothing difficult about the programming part of it, I'd say the difficulty lies in balancing how much your users are willing to pay for VC in your game. You want to make enough money to stay afloat, but players want to feel they get value for each dollar spent. Technically you have 3 routes to choose from, the first one has already been mentioned, a solution like social gold where VC is handled on the 3:rd party provider's server, you then interact with their servers using their API when transactions are made.
I haven't done this myself so I can't provide details. The second is the approach most CPA offer providers supply, an iframe with various payment methods and "offers" that you incorporate into your app. Their servers then talk to a script on your server each time a player buys VC or completes an offer, your script verifies the transaction then updates the amount of VC for that user in your database. Articles About Application Monetization. CHART OF THE DAY: Farmville-Maker Zynga's Revenues Reach $600 Million, Fueled By Social Obligations. The new kings of apps.
Their names may be unfamiliar -- Zynga, Fring, SPRXmobile -- but their apps are everywhere. Software is now dominated by a short list of powerhouses and start-ups offering byte-sized, mobile solutions. Software development has officially gone mobile. If you asked developers 10 years ago where they observed the most innovation, they'd have pointed to companies working on the PC, Mac, or game consoles. Today, the most innovative programs are being developed exclusively for wireless handheld devices. The emerging market of mobile applications started off on the smartphone, but it's now exploding with the rapid adoption of the iPad and other tablets.
Consumers will spend $6.2 billion downloading approximately 4.5 billion mobile apps this year alone -- and Gartner Research estimates those numbers will quadruple over the next three years. Fortune profiles some of the most successful entrepreneurs in this emerging market as well as the up-and-coming developers on the edge of mobile innovation. Ad-Supported Facebook Applications Are In For A Rude Awakening « @ the intersection.
Dear Facebook developer, if you’ve banked your livelihood on banner ad-supported applications get ready for a rude awakening. The deceptive advertising practices that have increasingly permeated Facebook applications, and driven effective CPMs on banner ad units to double-digit levels in some cases, are starting to get noticed outside of Facebook (Nick O’Neill of All Facebook has done a great job of covering this topic), which is leading to involved parties being shut down in the process. The longer-term ramifications of this put into question the business viability of many developers on Facebook’s platform. How Did We Get Here.
As recently as the 2nd half of last year Lookery, a Facebook ad network at the time, was guaranteeing developers a mere $0.15 CPM for their application inventory. Are converting well enough on a an impression basis to generate upwards of $10.00 effective CPM for many large Facebook developers. What’s Going to Happen Next. What to Do. Stay the Course. E.piphany. At times not losing is as important as winning. Customer ValidationE.piphany was an 11-month-old startup with 31 people and on fire. We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software. Joe Dinucci, our VP of Sales, was hot on the trail of our next big order. He had just demo’d our product to his friend, the CFO of Autodesk. After seeing the demo, the CFO walked Joe over to the office of Autodesk’s VP of sales, and said to her, “I think this product might solve your sales reporting problem.” After a demo she agreed it would. Joe came back to our company excited.
They Have A Problem and Know ItAt the time Autodesk’s sales organization was frustrated with their IT department. A Match Made in HeavenFor the next several weeks, the entire E.piphany engineering department worked with Autodesk’s sales operation team to build a prototype using real Autodesk data. Not quite. Wrong. The IT RevoltUnbeknownst to Joe a revolt was brewing in Autodesk’s IT organization. Quant Based Marketing for Start Ups. When I first got the job at Mint, Aaron Patzer (founder) told me I had to get Mint.com 100,000 users 6 months after launching. I began by making a start up marketing plan. Honestly, I was a bit nervous. The result: after 6 months Mint had over 1 million How did that happen? First off, the product was awesome. Instead of doing “social media marketing” and flailing around with random posts throughout the web we needed a framework and a new approach to pre-launch marketing.
Quant Based Marketing. Work backwards to the solution of what you need (that is the best way to guarantee success) and map it in Excel. Here’s an example for Mint: Target: 100,000 users in 6 months. Click to access the spreadsheet and use it yourself This is the KEY to any pre-launch marketing you are doing. Most people have the tendency to wait for their thing to launch, email a few friend, tweet about it and get on their knees to pray it works. There are two columns, total users and confirmed users. Gambit. The Future Of Social Media Monetization, Part 1. Editor’s Note: This post was written by Ro Choy, Chief Revenue Officer of RockYou. In this series, Choy will address the future of social media monetization, focusing on the potential of platforms such as Facebook and the ability for third parties such as RockYou to create their own platforms and monetize a multi-faceted approach to social media marketing. The Future of Social Media Monetization Last year (even six months ago) most questioned whether social media could deliver meaningful business results.
Whether it was the daily concern over Facebook’s revenue or the questioned utility of social applications, the general consensus was the entire social media industry was hard to monetize. Today, the huge success of social games, the increasing number of brand marketers using social media and the myriad of business targets that social media leaders are pursuing (payments, e-commerce, search, etc.) are referenced daily. Performance marketingBrand advertisingVirtual currency. ADTELLIGENCE White Paper: Monetizationof strategies and business models for Social Networks.