Just one month ago at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told the audience that the company had surpassed 150 monthly active users. One month later, the company’s user base has grown by a third, rocketing it past 200 million users. Monthly active users are a relatively broad metric when analyzing a company though, as daily active users are a more effective metric for measuring a company’s ability to monetize.
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Over the past 24 hours, two of the largest Facebook application developers, RockYou and Zynga, have announced relatively large funding rounds. RockYou raised a whopping $50 million and Zynga raised $15.18 million. What are these rounds going toward? RockYou is apparently turning their attention toward the booming social gaming space and expanding their advertising efforts, while Zynga is most likely stocking up on cash to help build out their ever expanding portfolio of popular games.
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Less than a month we wrote that Facebook had just trademarked FishVille. Weeks later the company is officially launching FishVille. Happy Aquarium, the application which FishVille is based on, is now the 5th largest application on the Facebook Platform. Given Happy Aquarium’s presence, I’d expect to see FishVille advertisements all over Facebook.
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To see the ongoing conversation about aggressive online advertising is both reassuring as well as disconcerting. The reason that it’s disconcerting is that Mike Arrington has just begun to breach a much greater issue by randomly attacking one (or a couple) companies in this space. If this attack was done just for page views then writing about the issues are almost as bad as the people performing the act.
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It’s a good month for Zynga. The company has one game which continues to thrive as the largest Facebook application ever and has a second application, Café World, which has raced up the charts in just a couple weeks. Playfish, now the second largest developer, also has had a great month with close to 20 percent growth, however it hasn’t been able to match Zynga who is simply dominating the Facebook platform.
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Zynga doesn’t stop growing. The company, which now owns 6 of the top 10 Facebook applications, has watched it’s latest application, Café World, leap up the charts in just over a week. It’s now the second largest game on Facebook in terms of daily active users and the tenth largest game in terms of monthly active users. With such a large number of daily users, it appears that Zynga has another hit on their hands.
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Playdom, one of the leading social gaming networks, announced today that they are launching a line of prepaid cards that will soon be available at Target, Walgreens, and 7-11. If you had any doubt that the social gaming space has become a big business, this should make things clear. The cards will now be available at more than 150,000 retail locations and can be used to purchase in-game currency on Mobsters and Sorority Life, two of Playdom’s largest games.
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To describe Zynga as a powerful influence on the Facebook developer platform would be an understatement. The company has achieved levels never thought possible. Farmville, the company’s leading application has reached levels that no other developer has ever come close to. In other words, the company is in a league of its own. With over 126 million monthly active users, the company accounts for the sum total of the next three largest developers: Playfish, RockYou, and Causes. So how did the company get to be so large?
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Over the weekend I wrote about the “massive protests” taking place in Zynga’s virtual world YoVille. I kind of poked at the protesters in the article because they are the vocal minority. When you’re in the midst of a protest it appears as if everybody is protesting. The new changes were controversial for those users who had spent time and money on the game over the past year or two. The main issue was that users are now forced to return to the game on a timed basis in order to earn revenue. I’m still not convinced it’s an unfair adjustment.
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YoVille, one of the largest virtual worlds on Facebook, recently experienced a relatively large protest against a major change yesterday which modified the way users can earn virtual currency. Previously, users entered a widget factory from where they could earn coins. While users can still earn coins there is a new process in which users must spend money to make money (as is typical in the real world). A number of users are furious and in the past few hours I’ve received numerous users frustrated with the change.
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