-TrialPay Logo-Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Will O’Brien of TrialPay to discuss the company’s offering and the current state of offer-based advertising on the web. While there has been the argument that social applications don’t have effective monetization strategies, there’s no doubt that social games have already cracked the monetization nut and are bringing in significant revenue.

Zynga reportedly is generating over $100 million and quite possibly closer to $200 million this year thanks to the massive success of FarmVille, which is now the largest game on Facebook. While each application’s revenue varies greatly, the greatest success is coming through virtual goods where offers are being injected into the transaction process. In terms of marketing offers at the point of transaction, this isn’t really anything new but that it’s finding so much success within social games in interesting.

E-book marketers have been using these strategies for a decade now. Even Amazon has built in similar models in which offers are built into the buying process but the world of virtual goods is still emerging which is why companies like TrialPay (Offerpal, Super Rewards, etc) have such a lucrative future. Developers will naturally build those applications that generate the most revenue and with social games proving to be a relatively profitable business, there’s no doubt that this space has a lot more growth ahead.

Check out my interview below with Will O’Brien. Also, if you’re wondering about my current fascination with “injected offers” it’s because I just finished reading “Integration Marketing” by Mark Joyner (a famous internet copywriter and marketer).

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