
Zynga Pushing Nine Figures In Revenues Thanks To Micro-Transactions - peter123
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/29/zynga-pushing-nine-figures-in-revenues-thanks-to-micro-transactions/
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beza1e1
How did they get micro-payments working? It is common knowledge to me that
consumers reject mini-payments. Did the attitude change? Or has Zynga found
some clever scheme?

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maxer2
i know on facebook their texas holdem app... when you get knocked out of the
weekly tournament you can buy back in for maybe $2 or something

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rantfoil
This just shows how attention is and continues to be the scarcest commodity in
an information glut world.

Maybe eyeballs mean something after all... but only if you hook it up to a way
to monetize, whether its Acai Berry / daily SMS horoscope ads, OfferPal, or
direct micropayments. Within the context of almost any content, that's
unacceptable, but within the concept of a social game like mobwars -- all is
fair game.

Yes people are making money doing low-bar / low-brow casual social network
games. Why? There's no skill involved! And that's a good thing. When it's pure
hedonic ramp, it's like shock of pure China White in the arm of bored people
everywhere.

If we weren't 110% consumed with building Posterous, I just might be tempted
to build some of this stuff myself. ;-)

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teej
Zynga's Mafia Wars is anything but low-bar. It might not be much to look at,
but their execution has been nothing short of brilliant to this point. They
flat out COPIED a game that was huge on Facebook (Mob Wars) and iterated their
way past it. They relentlessly used short iterations, A/B testing and customer
validation to beat the established competition.

Mafia Wars is now 5x bigger than Mob Wars.

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gabrielleydon
These numbers are real.

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rantfoil
Gabe knows because he's in the business (iMob) and he's seeing first hand
where this rabbit hole is leading...

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bemmu
The number is certainly believable. Extrapolating from my own MySpace app,
they would make $22.5M annually. Doesn't surprise me that they are able to
monetize a lot better ($100M), considering how much more addictive their games
are and their scale benefits.

