Digital Talent Agency

Top 25 Facebook Games for May, 2009

While the world looks to tweets, companies on Facebook are quietly becoming the future EA's of the internet.  
 

from Celebrity Cafe:

"When Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Shiermeyer, Justin Waldron, Andrew Trader, and Steve Schoettler started the development company, Zynga, in 2007, it's doubtful that any expected this type of success in such a brief amount of time. Zynga's games are featured on the popular social networking sites Facebook and Myspace. The company expects to earn $100 million in sales this year . . . proof that all those game credits add up.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, 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." Their games, which include "Dope Wars," "Texas Hold 'Em," and "Gang Wars," have an estimated 71 million registered users, with 46 million monthly active users.

BusinessWeek reported that in April, Zynga passed widget maker RockYou to become Facebook's most popular application maker. Their customers make up one-fifth of Facebook's 200 million users.

The San Francisco-based startup company has shaken off the disdain from "real" video game developers, reveling in the success of their simple but addictive games. Said Pincus, "A lot of people come to the game industry who aren't typical developers and they can unleash their creativity on these
massive platforms without the constraints of cost and time to market."

The highlights from the Chart above:

• Zynga and Playfish’s battle for the #1 spot continues between Texas HoldEm Poker and Pet Society, with the latter closing the gap with a gain of 1,348,759 to Zynga’s 1,054,775.
• However, that same growth did not hold true for spots 4 - 6 with Bumper Sticker, Pass A Drink, and Lil Green Patch losing about a million active users each.
• Playfish title Geo Challenge kept it’s #8 spot with 3.97 million active users this past month with Word Challenge coming in behind, but surprisingly enough the other Playfish titles were ousted by MindJolt Games who jumped all the way from #17 to #10.
• Zynga RPGs Vampire Wars and Street Racing increased in popularity with the former coming out on top at #12.
• Behind the major players, new comer Know-It-All-Triva appeared on the scene at #15 with 2,543,557 users, followed by another fresh face, 101 Eggs & More with 2,464,247 users.
• The past month also played host to two other new games for the Top 25 with Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap Games at #21 and Playfish’s newest title Restaurant City at #23.

Planning for Social Memes... Case Study: Susan Boyle, the internet singing sensation.

"ITV, YouTube and Simon Cowell have missed sharing a million-pound windfall because they have failed to reach a deal to sell advertising against clips of Susan Boyle, the internet singing sensation.

The Scotswoman’s performance on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent has been watched more than 75 million times on YouTube in a fortnight, but the television network is insisting that no advertisements be shown against the clips while it negotiates with the Google-owned video site"

We advise that media companies introducing new individuals to mass media and the public take the time to develop the appropriate social profiles and media channels BEFORE that personal or brand is presented to the public.  First movers typically develop and control the audience, and if something takes off, control the revenue.

Here's the complete article.

Susan Boyle competitor Shaheen Jafargholi is looking to become another social meme.

Older Generations Embracing Social Networks

"While online social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are known hang-outs for younger adults and teenagers, older generations in recent months have been taking to the medium at a faster rate than any other age group, according to industry reports.

But Facebook  popularity is growing most quickly among women older than 55, according to a site called Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook's growth.

There are now about 1.5 million female users older than 55 on the site, the group says -- roughly a 550 percent increase over six months ago. By comparison, membership among people younger than 25 grew by less than 20 percent over the same period, Inside Facebook says.

Facebook now says it has 200 million users, making its user base larger than the populations of all the world's countries except China, India, the United States and Indonesia. Such a vast presence, coupled with news media buzz about all social media, has pushed online social networking to a "tipping point," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Here's the complete article.

How Coke Became the Most Popular Facebook Page - after Obama.

"The Coke page, which totals 3.3 million "fans," wasn't even created by Coca-Cola, but by a pair of Los Angelenos who just love Coke.

"We've discussed a dozen hypotheses about why it took off," said Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing at Coca-Cola Co. One theory the company keeps coming back to, he said, was the quality of the photo -- a crisp, high-resolution image of a Coke can covered with a thin layer of condensation. "For us as marketers, luckily it was exactly right -- the can we had in the marketplace. ... It grabs you." He said another theory is that Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski had very active, expressive "social graphs," i.e., their network of Facebook friends. But "we can't measure that," he said.

Now normally when a giant multinational company calls a consumer about something the consumer has created in that company's brand name or image, it's not a good sign. And initially Mr. Jedrzejewski said he was worried about it.

"Everyone has this vision that if something like this happens, the big company will send you off to Guantanamo," he said. "This was exactly the opposite."

Coke instead flew the guys down to Atlanta for a few days of meetings, a tour of the World of Coke museum and a visit to the company's legendary archives. It was a friendly, not heavy-handed approach, Mr. Jedrzejewski said.

"We talked openly about ideas, the future of the fan page," he said.

Coke's actions in sharing the page are indicative of not only the lessons the beverage giant has learned in the social-media space but also proof that big brands can tread gracefully in social media.

 

Excerpts taken from an Adage article by Abbey Klaassen.  Complete article here.

Facebook pages are becoming one of the most important social networking tools on the internet.  Mashable has a recent article on success with Facebook Fan Pages here.

Mashable also reviews the new changes to Facebook from a Social Network Marketing POV here.

    

MySpace Founders on Charlie Rose

Discussions on China, Facebook, Mobile Devices, and Future Revenue.

Charlie Rose - Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson


Techcrunch has the complete transcript here.

What Are People Doing (Apps) on Facebook?

Directly from Facebook,
Most Popular Facebook Apps, by total monthly users:

Apps that are New On the Scene and are Becoming Hugely Popular:

Besides flirting (aka "networking"), sharing photos, and staying connected, users are star making these Facebook apps above.  Apps seems to mostly run the line between: increasing profile functionality, games, philanthropy (never has it been so easy), and various flirting functions.  Maybe it's time to create a Facebook version of Laslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  Consider Facebook as beginning to resemble something more like an operating system and you'll see the potential.

 

Friendster: Big In Southeast Asia

Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region, reported today by TechCrunch.

_{Malaysian pop star Karen Kong is one of the most popular people on Friendster, with over 150,000 friends}

It's become Southeast Asia's top social networking site. Asia is home to three-quarters of Friendster's 58 million users, compared to 17% in the U.S., and it's the source of 89% of the site's traffic, compared to just 8% from North America. While its bigger rivals MySpace and Facebook are just discovering the land across the Pacific, Friendster is already the most-visited web site in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the second most-visited site in Malaysia and Singapore, according to rankings from web tracker Alexa.

Friendster's international reach has become a competitive advantage, for the company as well as for users. Five months after releasing her first album, Malaysian pop singer Karen Kong uploaded a video of a recent concert performance onto her Friendster page last summer, attracting two million viewers, mostly from Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Indonesia. Her manager, Fred Chong, says that even though the record label created an expensive web site for the artist, Kong's Friendster profile is "way more powerful than any official page," attracting up to 800,000 page views per month. With more than 150,000 friends linked to her page, Kong has the biggest following of any Friendster user. "Her profile just exploded," says Chong. "For us, it's been a miracle." Friendster's trying to pull off another miracle. It's reaching out to the 210 million Internet users in China, where the company's user base is already "in the hundreds of thousands," Lindstrom says. Last September, the company began rolling out foreign language capabilities: traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese communities around the world, followed by simplified Chinese for mainland China, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Unlike MySpace, which has launched separate, localized sites for different countries, Friendster is keeping all of its worldwide users on one multilingual site.

taken from this article by Ling WooLiu and this post by Michael Arrington.

Latin Social Networks - Regional Players Vs. Facebook

Latin in America.

According to the most recent Census Bureau projections, about 60 percent of total U.S. growth will come from the Latino population — that's almost 100 million additional people. One in four Americans will be Latino.  Hispanics have accounted for more than half (50.5%) of the overall population growth in the United States in this decade, a significant new demographic milestone for the nation's largest minority group.  Latin Americans also voted 2:1 in favor of Obama, a major driver in the success of the campaign.

Latin American Social Networks.

Latin America is a growing online market, with monthly unique visitors in the region growing from 53.6 million users in June 2007 to 61.6 million users in April 2008.

More internet users means more opportunity for social networks. For example, a new social network, Sonico, claims to have gained 17 million registered users since it launched last July.

But Hi5 is the largest social network in the Spanish-speaking countries (except for Google’s Orkut, which dominates Brazil). San Francisco-based hi5 gained its position by doing things like introducing a Spanish version of its site a couple of years go, while market leaders Facebook and MySpace focused on US growth. This past April, hi5 had 12.8 million unique visitors, about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world. That’s a 20 percent increase from two months ago, when the site had 10.7 million unique visitors in Latin America, according to Comscore. This is part of hi5’s worldwide growth trend: Hi5 has grown from 31.5 million last December, according to comScore.

But Facebook has shown the most shocking growth around the world over the past half year, and is also booming in Latin America, likely spurred by the introduction of its Spanish-language version last year.

So what’s driving some networks’ growth, besides shear numbers of new Latin American users? Maybe, for Facebook, the fact that it is largely comprised of real people providing factual information about themselves — not fake profiles like what you see on other social networks — makes the difference? It’s not clear what’s happening driving Sonico’s growth, and anyway, it doesn’t register as a top site with comscore. Hi5, meanwhile, has continued with its market-specific customizations. It has recently introduced two new versions for Argentinians and Castilians, with more dialect translations to come. It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against Orkut. It has also introduced a Spanish-language help page. Maybe this will allow it to keep growing, and maintain its regional market leadership.

Facebook: The Global Mothership

 

MySpace reached only 121 unique visitors in November and grew a slow 16 percent over the previous year. Hi5 did pretty well, coming in at 58 million uniques with a 89 percent growth rate. Orkut also did pretty well, too, coming in at 46 million with 86 percent annual growth. Things were quieter for Friendster and Bebo: 31 million with a 10 percent growth rate and 24 million with a 20 percent growth rate, respectively.

Why is Facebook growing?

The site has differentiated itself as a place where you share real information with real friends in a secure setting — in spite of launching years after some of its rivals. It started on college campuses in early 2004, and only let you connect with people you knew on campus. It opened up over the years to new “networks” — high schools, companies, and eventually cities and countries — but it always retained this concept of privacy. While rivals like MySpace made your user profile public, Facebook even today only lets other see excerpts of your profile unless they’re friends with you or in the same network as you. The result is that Facebook has near-universally convinced its users to provide real information about themselves; on MySpace, for example, people often create and use fictional profiles.

Facebook has also introduced a tool for users to translate its site into 35 languages so far, with 60 more in development. More than 70 percent of of users are now outside of the U.S.

parts taken from an article by Eric Eldon for VentureBeat and this post by Paul Glazowski for Mashable.

Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising)

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Here's the complete article.

by Erick Schinfeld for TechCrunch

Web Politics, Viral Candidates.

By Jose Antonio Vargas for the Washington Post



"Obama's unprecedented online success guarantees that there's not a single campaign in 2012, Democratic or Republican, that won't place the Web at the core of its operation. The floodgates are open. This doesn't mean just hiring Web developers, bloggers, videographers -- the works. It also means using the Internet to invite people into the process, giving them something to work for, offering them a stake in victory or defeat. More than any other medium in our history, the Web is by the people, for the people. This new dynamic will transform the way campaigns are run -- and, beyond that, the way the winning candidate governs. Fundamentally, all of this is redefining our relationship with our politics."

Here's the complete article.