609k online players - a day!

02/15/2008

The burgeoning market of games and applications on giant community websites like Facebook is presenting marketers with new challenges, an interesting article on Tech Crunch reveals this week. Social networking is all about scale, and with nearly 16 000 different applications already on Facebook, marketers are looking to get noticed by forming alliances with the already established large application companies.

Those companies, which Tech Crunch examples as Slide or RockYou, know that cross promotion between applications is the path to success....and they are charging smaller developers who want to use them to find it. But in the latest development of a rapidly growing sector, whole networks are apparently starting to form across specific application genres.

The Tech Crunch piece reveals that in the social gaming category alone, there is a growing rivalry between the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga. The latter (see previous InfoPowa reports) is a network of gaming applications founded by Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus and built on classic games like Poker, Battleship, and Attack! that live on social networks like Facebook and Bebo.

Both have just launched separate developer platforms for other gaming applications. The appeal to smaller social game developers is similar: join one of the gaming networks and see your game promoted on the toolbar or gaming page when people are playing other games in the network. It's a proven technique to rapidly develop and monetise a player audience.

Tech Crunch reveals that both companies claim impressive numbers when it comes to their respective audiences. SGN boasts "millions" of users and 700 million pageviews a month, whilst Zynga is more specific, saying it has 1.3 million daily active users across Facebook, Bebo, Meebo, and Friendster.

Zynga's most popular game is Texas Hold’Em poker, with an incredible 609 000 daily active users in Facebook alone, followed by Blackjack, Attack!, Scramble, and Sea Wars. At least on Facebook, it appears that Zynga has more daily active users.

Zynga is likely to grow further, having recently acquired two smaller gaming developers: one is behind the CLZ group of applications, which have 365 000 daily active users, and the developers behind the Superheros application claim 34 000 daily active users.

Community marketing strategies and technology are developing fast, with SGN currently engaged in launching a set of APIs for developers and its Gaming Hub application on Facebook. This will attempt to create a “gaming graph” that connects a visitor to other games in the hub, particularly the ones his or her friends are playing. Joining the hub will let Facebook members keep track of what their friends are playing, their high scores, and will move all game-related feeds from their profile pages to the hub.

Plans for the gaming hub will also eventually include it becoming a mini ad network for games. Zynga, on the other hand, will have advertising on its hub from the start, splitting any ad revenues with game developers. But the ads will be secondary to the cross-promotion.