Brace yourselves: Facebook’s personalized search engine, Graph Search, is coming to a wall near you. In this infographic, you’ll learn how the tool evolved out of Facebook’s relationship with Bing, how the search function will benefit small business owners, and what you should be doing on your page right now to get ready.
Find out how to use Google Tools to manage social media content and campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an interactive online event starting June 6. Monica Morse (left), head of social & SMB solutions at Google, will familiarize you with a wide range of Google tools such as trends, Google+ and Hangouts. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
Rising server costs and surging traffic have led the reddit team to resurrect an existing, but long-neglected premium feature of the link-sharing site called reddit gold. “We have a choice to make,” reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a blog post. “We can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through reddit gold.” In other words, reddit is trying to monetize, and it’s trying not to screw it up.
Last month we shared a list of reasons why Vimeo is the coolest video site for creatives. However, we pointed out one undeniable fault in the alternative online video sharing site—creators had no options for monetizing their videos. Well that is about to change. Although Vimeo is still going to remain ad-free (so advertising revenue is off the table), today the video site has announced some new features to help creators make money off of their amazing work.
The first wave of the social gaming bubble may have popped. I’m not the first one to say it, and I won’t be the last. Zynga is at an all time record low, and traffic is declining. Playdom and Playfish, two giants of yesteryear, have seen their player numbers fade out.
That said, I know a lot of people in the industry, and the smart ones always knew they couldn’t keep every player forever and so began to focus on the more serious players. By offering them bonus packages and improved experiences, they incited those users to buy more.
So what exactly is involved in the art of social game purchases? A new infographic takes a look.
It’s been a year since YouTube started streaming live video officially and to celebrate YouTube Live’s first birthday, the company has released a number of new features, including the option for publishers to charge viewers to watch live streams.
In case you didn’t hear, our mediabistro network recently joined forces with the Inside Network, and since then we’ve all been working hard to create the leading network of social media news on the web. In addition to that, we’ve been working hard to power up our conferences, and I’m happy to say that the upcoming Socialize West in San Francisco is really going to have a massive number of experts and professionals, delivering the goods on how they make money using social media. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Optimization, retention and engagement are the keys in this still emerging space, and I strongly recommend you hit up Socialize to meet up with us and find out how to leverage this space to make money.
Tapjoy, a company that provides monetization and distribution services, released today that they have a new way for independent developers to evolve their games into profitable and popular titles. According to the company, they plan to invest their resources and capital into pre-launch games that have the potential to become successful. If a game is chosen, it will receive monthly marketing credits to acquire new users through Tapjoy’s network of over 100 million social gamers and 200 million mobile consumers.
Social Times recently attended the “SF Game Developers Workshop: A Post Mortem of Ravenwood Fair” hosted by Yetizen. The featured speakers included John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite, seasoned gaming industry veterans who shared their experiences with regards to the Ravenwood Fair project (facebook.com/RavenwoodFair). Ravenwood Fair has recently surpassed 10 million MAUs (over 1.1 million DAUs) and is one of the best monetizing games on Facebook. Read more
Users are global and access to content should be ubiquitous across all platforms. Developers need a single, unified, billing system to cover all devices and monetize users globally. In this article, we summarize four key players in this monetization solution space as relates to multi-platform billing.
In today’s mobile application world, the terminology and technology can move faster than the creative thinkers and businesses, and we at Social Times thought we could help by putting together the Mobile Marketing Dictionary. The dictionary has all the terms that you’re going to encounter as you try to buy advertising on mobile applications, publish advertising on your own mobile application or get installations for your mobile app. Read the Mobile Marketing Dictionary here and please let us know if there’s a term you’re curious about or one we missed.
