Earn FB Credits

The third biggest network of fb games has signed a 5 year contract to promote fb credits.

Now you will be able to play “Pet Society” and “Restaurant City” with your own fb credits.

Way Coool z.

WildTangent is continuing its foray into Facebook and social gaming, now providing brand-advertising offers on developer Playdom’s Facebook app, Tiki Farm. The tropical island farming game is beginning to feature brands that sponsor particular existing virtual goods in the game. Instead of a user paying for the good, they watch a video or somehow engage with an ad to get it. The first available is an orange tree, sponsored by Herbal Essence.

Although WildTangent has been offering a variety of sponsored advertising services for casual games, massively multiplayer online games, and other web-based games, it began focusing on tighter integration of virtual goods recently with the launch of BrandBoost. While some games may want to have an advertiser sponsor an item, the service can provide free access to a subscription-based game in exchange for watching a brand’s video. Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz is also using the service, during the puzzle-shooter games’ weekly tournaments on Facebook.

We’ve covered a variety of companies beginning to get in to this area. WildTangent’s has an interesting advantage: direct relationships with 75 of the top 100 advertisers in the US, that it has developed over the years it has been running branded ads in games across the web, and through strategic investors like marketing conglomerate WPP. Those ads could be about anything from entertainment like new games and moves, to consumer packaged goods, auto, etc. Many other companies provide engagement-based video advertising provided by other networks, or more general services. WildTangent tells us its brand advertisers are looking for a qualitatively good experience for users, to help increase public perception. Tying a brand to a specific virtual item that a user is already familiar with in a game is one way to make the connection especially clear.

WildTangent charges on a cost-per-engagement basis, using a custom rich media format. On Facebook, it plans to expand to Facebook’s forthcoming 760 pixel width once that becomes available. Although advertisers have sometimes balked at going off an Interactive Advertising Bureau standard format, WildTangent tells us that many of its clients are seeking out these formats, to try to reach users in more meaningful ways. In many cases, the company will initially provide the creative service for an ad, and if it proves to work well, the client will do subsequent ads in-house. The ad format for sponsored items may include an overlay on top of the price the good normally costs, to help show users the virtual value of what they’re getting by watching the ad.

The game has already been in testing sponsored items with FreeRealms; other developers running BrandBoost include Sony Online Entertainment, Outspark and OMGPOP.

While many offer companies are looking for more brand advertising, WildTangent is looking for more inventory — whoever ends up with the most business, more brand ads should mean more revenue for developers. On that note, WildTangent says it is looking at other social platforms besides Facebook, but isn’t saying any more at this point.

Jambool, the payments startup that offers in-game payments on Facebook through a product called Social Gold, recently announced that it has begun offering international currencies for players in other countries. Localized currencies are becoming more important for payments in social gaming, especially with the ever more international audience on Facebook.

The first nine currencies Social Gold is supporting, including the US dollar, are all from either English-speaking countries like Australia or Western European countries like Sweden. But the end plan for Jambool, along with its rivals, is to allow payments from many more of the world’s 150+ currencies.

Vikas Gupta, the co-founder of Jambool, says that offering local currencies is important for selling virtual goods in markets beyond the US. “People will pay more in their local currencies because it’s more clear to them what they’re getting,” Gupta told us earlier this week.

However, he recommended against also trying to tailor the prices to local markets. “If you change prices for different geographies, you’re encouraging fraud,” Gupta said. “I don’t think there’s any need to. You see people paying 50 percent more of their disposable income in a country like China, on games, than they do in the US. That speaks volumes, I think.” What Gupta does recommend is localizing the language and features of games that have large international audiences.

We spoke to Gupta after his panel at that Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, where he also gave out some recent statistics from the games his company works with. Purchasing rates are still low, with often times  only couple percent of players making a purchase at all, but a growing number of people that make an initial purchase will buy more.

Following the first purchase 56 percent will buy again, according to Jambool, while another 25 percent will make two or more purchases. The average amount purchased across all these groups is , while there’s a significant group of “whales” who spend over ,000.

Social Gold takes an average 7-10 percent cut from the developers it works with, which includes any fees charged by the end payment companies it works with, like PayPal, Visa or the recently-launched “virtual debt” company, Kwedit. By comparison, the in-house Credits that Facebook pushes take about 30 percent, although apps that use Credits get special promotion in Facebook’s Games Dashboard, and other benefits, like Facebook’s brand.

Along with the increased likelihood of a purchase from international users if they can pay in their own currency, Gupta also says that having an in-game option for a single-click purchase triples the likelihood of a user buying a virtual item. In general, streamlining payments is key for attracting impulsive purchases.

Besides offering advice and design support to game developers, Gupta says that fraud prevention is also growing in importance. More fraud is tied in part to having a more international audience, but it will also be more of a problem if social games become more like MMOs, a trend Gupta expects to take place.

Today, fraud still isn’t much a risk to developers, because virtual currency is usually only good for a single player. But games with more direct interaction between players and second-hand markets for goods quickly find fraud to be a real problem. “As the ecosystem developers, it’ll be a bigger challenge,” Gupta says.

Facebook has just announced a few more details on its 3rd f8 conference coming up next month in San Francisco, and officially opened registration. It’s been a while since Facebook last held an f8, so it’s sure to be a big week. Already, developers are wondering what announcements Facebook will make regarding Credits, location, and the Open Graph API.

Here are the details:

• Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
• Location: The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center
• Address: 635 8th Street, San Francisco, CA (Map)

Mark Zuckerberg will be giving the keynote at 10am, followed by breakout sessions in the afternoon on “New Tools,” best practices for building “fast scalable, and engaging products,” and Facebook’s open source products. On Thursday, there will be an “intimate post-f8 Hackathon” that developers can express interest in attending here.

This year, tickets cost 5 for professionals, and for students. Here’s the registration page at Eventbrite, and the Facebook Page for f8. We’ll keep you up to date as more information becomes available.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

For developers interested in digging deep into monetization inside social apps and games on the Facebook Platform and beyond, we’re holding our inaugural Inside Social Apps 2010 conference the day before f8 in San Francisco. At Inside Social Apps, executives from all the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, including Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts), Playdom, CrowdStar, 6 waves, Slide, RockYou, Five Minutes, and Lolapps will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective.

For a full agenda of our day’s events, click here. Space is very limited, so we encourage you to register soon.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

While RockYou already provides offers, banners, and other forms of advertising to application developers, it’s added another: a form of engagement advertising, that it’s calling “Deal of the Day.”

The company provides advertisers — especially big brand advertisers — with banner ads that cost based on different engagement actions. These might include a user downloading a coupon, taking a poll, becoming a fan of a Facebook Page, and more. The ads appear within applications from RockYou and developer partners on Facebook and other sites.

Facebook itself offers engagement ads directly linked to Facebook products like events, Pages, and videos.

The ads will be part of RockYou’s various monetization services; earlier this week, it announced others, including virtual currency and local ads.

According to a new report from Dan Zarrella, the weekend is the best time to post content on Facebook as articles posted then are shared the most. One explanation for the phenomenon was that more than half of companies block Facebook. While I’ve noticed that Twitter is the exact opposite, this report definitely sheds some light on Facebook user behavior.

Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how accurate this report is. The primary reason is that no information was shared about the sampling data. How were articles selected when testing sharing volume? Was an arbitrary data set selected for testing against Facebook’s share analytics tools? Whatever the model is, it’s definitely interesting.

I also would imagine that many Facebook users turn to their mobile devices to monitor content while on the go during the weekend. Then again, the same users who are blocked from accessing Facebook at work may be visiting their friends’ activity while in transit to and from work each day. Unfortunately this basic glimpse in to Facebook user behavior is nothing more than that: a basic glimpse.

I’d be interested to see other statistics on Facebook sharing. Do notice that your friends share more information on the weekends or is there more activity during the weekdays?

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