If you look back a couple of years, nobody really expected that social games, like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’Em Poker, would be a particularly powerful force in social media. How wrong we were. Compare the stats in the graph below to any site you work for or deal with:
If that wasn’t horrible enough, you might like to think about their *minute* ongoing maintenance, development and content-production costs. To torture you a little more, their users might be seeing paid-for brand messages or, more likely, paying for imaginary goods that help them ‘advance’ towards infinity a little faster.
In the meantime, free-for-basic-use social network platform Ning is in the doldrums and cutting its free service. Not enough people were that bothered, it emerges, to get the extras that paying a pittance would allow.
Two-thirds of the traffic to Facebook is actually going to games within that site, according to a participant at a recent conference. The table above shows that Farmville has 73mn active users who check in at least monthly; more recently, it’s been estimated at 80mn users, with 30mn of those using the application every day. At this rate of growth, those February statistics are already very much out-of-date. Zynga, the company that produces the three games I’ve mentioned, will make over $100mn dollars revenue this year, thanks to micro-payments from players seeking faster success or a winning edge over online opponents.
Perhaps perversely, Zynga is now in a good position to offer Facebook advice on creating a business that actually makes money:
Facebook’s biggest partner had a suggestion for the adolescent social network: figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.
“Facebook is at a crossroads,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. “They have to decide whether its more important to be the web’s social platform, to make their social plumbing pervasive,” presumably through an expansion of more open technologies and communications infrastructure such as Facebook Connect. It’s sort of like being the plumber for the online world.”
None of this was predicted by anyone supposedly in-the-know. Social media pundits got it wrong for a few reasons:
- Games are consistently viewed as childish and irrelevant by ‘serious’ media pundits and analysts.
- To be fair, that’s also true of their audiences. Serious media professionals don’t want to hear it. Games are juvenile and not worthy of consideration. Full stop.
- While brands were keen to create a Facebook presence, their efforts focused on fan-pages and branded widgets that appeared on users’ profiles.
Where’s there’s some hope in all of this for the rest of the media-sphere is the great support it gives to the idea of micropayments as a revenue source. If people are prepared to pay for a pretend-tractor, then surely a two-minute video clip isn’t asking too much?
Again, though, it’s about context. People have been paying 10p for less than two sentences for a long time: because those two sentences are important in the context. While getting that tractor will net you sufficient crops to buy a new make-believe barn right now, the video gets you nothing. Media still needs to work out why it’s valuable in the first place.
picture credit: mnplsbnut
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Hey Ian. Spot on. Content = important; context & value are everything. I wish I could have made the point as well as you. Media (and brands) generally haven’t figured out yet which bits we care for most.… It’s fascinating to see it all get broken up and recompiled in smaller bits.
“Recompiled in smaller bits” seems to be the way forward at the moment — foreign correspondents are “foreign” correspondents. Local news is “hyper-local”. Reviews are “user-voices”. ad infinitum.
Back to games, can we make a game-like hunger for news? I genuinely believe a lot of people have that, but until it comes to the crunch, they won’t express it with their pennies.
From what I hear, yes is the answer… news in an app like way. In pieces. Via iPads and Mr Murdoch. Apparently. Allegedly. That’s just a rumour though.