Making the most out of monetization platforms is a subtle yet important challenge for many because revenue is the blood line of social games. Discussing the optimization of the monetization funnel was a panel consisting of the founder of Sometrics Ian Swanson, VP of Sales and Marketing at Nexage Jon Phenix, Chief Architect of Zoosk John Smart and Founder and CTO of Jia Shen. Decision making can be tough with the emergence of many news business models – an issue the panelists delved into, revealing some of the insight from their experience dealing with developers. Read more after the jump.

The common theme shared by these speakers was that you never want to rely on just one company or metric. It’s better to broaden your horizon and test everything. The first speaker was Jon Phenix with Nexage. The mobile advertising market is a 650MM market and expected to grow to 1.5 B by 2013. Inventory supply is beginning to out-weigh demand. Developers are having trouble filling their ad inventory and are increasingly questioning the quality of ads. Nexage provides a platform to allow users to filter out certain types of ads. With an increasing proliferation of smartphones, developers need to make sure they leave no stones unturned. Nexage provides an SDK for smartphones that connects with major ad networks so they can fill a lot of demand from a single implementation. Mobile ad mediation solutions include brand safety, meditation across 50+ ad sources, optimization, easy tracking and an open API and SDK suite that connects with major platforms. Jon from Nexage discussed their experience working with Reuters which took their fill rate from 23% to 95%.

Next up on the mic was Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, who broke down the game mechanics to keep track off in order to eventually funnel your users towards purchasing. The basic statistics found in the social gaming industry are that 3-5% of users pay on average on average with a high end on the 10-15% for high niche games. Key take aways from Jia’s talk were:

- Create perceived value by creating higher value on actions, items and events based on variables like difficulty, rarity, time, artwork and social functionality
- Sell items for various categories of emotions: self expression, competition, stats, consumables, progress/level
- Monitor ‘time’ and use it to create desire as people want instant gratification and selling them consumables that can save them time is a way to increase monetization
- Use level locking by providing visible goals and achievements and regulate item releases to pace game progression
- Collectibles fuel the desire to return and complete the acquisition of item sets
- Moderating users progress through the game is important and developers have to be careful to maintain pacing to take care of both casual and hardcore users.

In conclusion, it’s important to design perceived value and then limit access to value, using ‘time’ as a key element to moderate. By limiting game interactions, you can get protection against overinflation of economy from careless acts such as over-creativity. This also paves the road for creating new monetization schemed in the future. Jia cited an example of Social City having population and money earning mechanics, both which keep each other in check. Creation of demand then will allow you to maximize the % of your paying users because they will see your game as valuable.

The third speaker was Ian Swanson of Sometrics. Sometrics helps online gaming companies make money by monetizing their audience. An offer network is a payment gateway living within the application entrenched with offers such as Netflix etc. Due to the availability of many offer companies (about 30 different ones), it’s challenging to figure out which offer company to use. Making it easy for users to purchase virtual goods can help increase the number of paying users as one purchase can lead to another. If your game has a global appeal, such as farming games, it’s important to provide users with payment gateways that can satisfy a global audience’s needs. The key takeaways from Sometrics speech were:

- Don’t use one offer company; A/B test 2-4 different ones that you can organize in tabs
- Always use a control group
- Offer companies differ in terms of localization, exclusives, optimization, customer support and design
- Benefits: 25-50% increase in revenues

An interesting statistic came from Ian Swanson who stated that the find simple RPG games like Mafia Wars to have the best ARPPU but probably won’t garner the user base some of the farm mmo’s have amassed.