

How Zynga is doing 100 MM in revenue and how we can help you do it - suhail
http://blog.mixpanel.com/how-zynga-is-doing-100-mm-in-revenue-and-how

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jacquesm
"Rumors are going around of Zynga supposedly doing something around 100MM in
revenue this year--that's huge. Whether or not the rumor is entirely true is
beside the point - something is definitely going on."

It's a rumor, not a fact and that makes a big difference to me.

Also, what is a MM ?

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mattmaroon
If it's wrong, it's not far off. I run some Facebook RPGs. I did an estimate
using their user numbers (not hard find since the networks publish them) and
assuming similar revenue per user (RPU) to our games and guesstimated $75m.
Their games probably also have higher RPU than ours, so I could totally see
$100m or even significantly more now that FarmVille is taking off.

On the other hand, as MixPanel pointed out, they buy a LOT of traffic. Not
just on Myspace either. On both networks you can build a compelling enough
game to get your RPU above the cost of buying a user. The difference between
the two is that on Facebook, your app can succeed without that.

Zynga's spending what has to be at least $2m/mo in ads, maybe 3 or 4. They're
also using ads on their games to cross promote with other games, and those ads
could be bringing in money too. When you factor that in, as high as 50% of
their revenue could be going right out the door to advertising. (I don't think
that's the case though, if I had to venture a guess I'd say 20-25%).

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blader
They also have 300+ FTEs in addition to 200+ contractors.

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robotron
or "Use Our Analytics Tool To Make Billions!"

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imp
Yeah, I don't like mixpanel's attitude. It's like they don't even acknowledge
other analytics packages and act like they're the only one that can do a
funnel analysis. I don't see what their differentiation is.

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trefn
We do a few things differently than everyone else:

1\. Event based tracking: the steps of your funnel don't have to be page
views; you can easily track user interactions (songs played, links upvoted,
etc) as funnel steps.

2\. Dead simple segmentation: any additional data you send us about the funnel
step can be used to segment. If you know the user's gender, the ad campaign
they came from, or anything else we can give specific conversion rates based
on that segmentation.

3\. Easily create funnels on the fly: Each step of the funnel is tracked with
one line of code. When you want to make a new funnel, you just start sending
us data with a new funnel name.

We didn't mean to come across as having an attitude - sorry if it felt that
way.

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there
who?

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mgrouchy
With some googling it appears that Zynga is a social games network(based on
open social).

No link or anything in the article(and I had never heard of it before).

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wayne
They also make a bunch of popular Facebook apps like Mafia Wars and Vampires.

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mgrouchy
Those are games(albeit annoying ones) I do recognize. That million dollars in
ad revenue they spent on myspace ads paid off!

