In which the planet has just discovered gaming

Advantage zyaada notes: Early mid year estimates had indicated $100 million for Zynga of “Farmville”, Texas Hold’em and Mafia Wars across facebook and myspace. Now this is likely to be revised up by a few percentage points for zynga alone…Now you know why Tweetmeme and Twitterfeed are so conjoined with Twitter. Let’s hope this pans out ’socially’. Other animation/gaming players like Rock you and Zynga and Playdom all have $100m each in funding and by current engagement rates are likely to fare equally well for the PE involved in each case…long time to go before natural selection burns a few holes..

Even if the Virtual world envisaged with Dubai World comes to a nought, facebook and twitter are not doing so badly after all. Tweetmeme and Twitterfeed to name a few would have an even more significant overlap with the base ‘platform’ of twitter than the seemingly conjoined but really technology independent gaming networks and they are also on spinal tap.

Facebook Games Maker Zynga To Make $100 Million This YearNicholas Carlson|May. 1, 2009, 3:12 PM |

Mark Pincuss social gaming startup Zynga, which makes multiplayer games like the popular Texas Holdem for social networks Facebook and MySpace, is growing faster than you think.We reported in January that it closed $50 million in sales during 2008. Now BusinessWeeks Sarah Lacy says the startup has “annual sales of about $100 million, according to several people close to the company.”Most of that money comes from “the 2% to 10% of users who pay $1 an hour to play premium games or buy virtual goods.”Sarah says the other hot startup in social gaming is Playdom, which generates about $50 million a year in sales.

via Facebook Games Maker Zynga To Make $100 Million This Year.

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Or, How to pay Facebook for the brand value you are making good on

Things are looking up for the social business model and those aspiring to be social brands!
“It’s too early to say”. “The jury is still out” and “It’s difficult to tell” because things are not so easy. But in the running popularity wars of Facebook and Twitter, while Twitter catches up on its share of traffic, it has to be said that Facebook is reflecting maturity. Notwithstanding a lot of bull from personal users who have been long time facebook fans, Facebook managed to roll out changes which reduced the functionality gap between itself and twitter and while both have now made their pages more manageable by tweaking ‘lists’ and other such, Facebook’s early advertising revenues has also given it some ‘moral strength’ and some ‘freshness of ideas’.

Facebook has kicked off the non advertising led era of brand reputation management, product launches and the knowledge era for brands and products everywhere with a very simple proposition. It is going to cost you a packet and you are doing it because you are getting what you want. In effect, you choose your specific segments of Facebook users from healthcare users to premium hotel services user or even mothercare and feminine hygiene product users and instead of just paying for banal advertising , you pay for engaging the consumers. First off, you would pay $10K and $30K for holding contests and while basic pages remain free, Facebook will control both look and performance. More details here

Also, all these launches coming without fanfare is a step in the right direction as information economy holds and knowledge is at a premium. Also, as more than 40 million users spend 30 minutes and more on the site, they will soon start allocating more time to stay in touch. All in all, another far thinking proposition which seems to have outlasted its detractors in the last 2-3 years. Are things looking up for Twitter?

P&G, Pepsi and even those with primarily domestic markets in the USA like Kraft and the sports brands will definitely find this a paying proposition and not to denigrate advertising but at a much more premium and effective brand value than two-bit clicks and CTRs

This is not a part of the FACEBOOK VS. TWITTER series 19/800 esp. not the part where “facebook wins”, just one of those things we started, socially!

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