Posts Tagged ‘RockYou’

Are any of these companies really worth what people are willing to pay?

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I recently had a chance to chat with several leading executives from top social gaming companies for my first Social Times Pro report, “Virtual Goods in Social Games: What Sells Best, Who Buys Most, and How Your Company Can Profit”. This is a must read if you’re in the industry.

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RockYou announced today a $10 million round of funding from Japanese technology giant Softbank and also purchased majority shares in its joint venture with SoftBank called RockYou Asia. RockYou plans on increasing its social gaming prowess in the Japanese, Korean and Chinese markets and is already live on Mixi in Japan, Xiaonei in China and Cyworld in Korea. Softbank is already a force in Japan with the country’s most popular search engine and e-commerce site. This move should help position Softbank to become a stronger competitor as it aims to solidify its presence in the social gaming markets. Read more after the jump.

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It seems like every possible empire building game that can be made is being made on Facebook, and RockYou’s My Casino is the latest in the trend. The game gives you the power to build your own casino from ground up – complete with slots, poker and craps. The game fits in nicely with RockYou’s current arsenal and is steadily growing from its current user base of 660K MAUs.

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With tens of millions of users playing many of the top social games, you would imagine that users would have a greater say in the future of the application. That’s exactly where the idea of player unions come in and Jason McDonald, an avid Zoo World player, appears to be the creator of the first social game players union. The “OFFICIAL Zoo World PLAYERS UNION” is an unofficial group according to RockYou, yet it appears true that Jason McDonald has been meeting with RockYou execs on behalf of players to negotiate changes.
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RockYou are today launching their “Deal of the Day” (DOTD) ad unit, which gives flash game developers the ability to offer and monetize deals on virtual goods and services. This offering is part of RockYou’s ad network, which reaches 280 million people across most of the major social networks. Lisa Marino, Chief Revenue Officer at RockYou, in an interview with SocialTimes, provided a bit of insight.
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Recently, we noticed that RockYou had been promoting it’s ZooWorld application by using graphic ads on the Meebo chat service. This is certainly another sign of the growth of Facebook games, not only in reach, but in value to advertisers, as they pay to make placements on disparate networks or in this case, chat aggregators. We investigate how other game companies are attracting users to their Facebook games from outside of Facebook.
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RockYou has come under fire recently after a SQL injection flaw resulted in a data breach which exposed over 32 million RockYou user emails and passwords. Rather than immediately solving the problem however, RockYou was complacent. As Nik Cubrilovic pointed out, “They have not taken steps to rectify the problems that caused the breach and have not addressed their users in a suitable or adequate manner. An appropriate response would have been to take the site down for a period of a few hours and enforce that users enter new passwords, which would be stored in a hashed or encrypted form.” Two weeks later a class action has been filed.
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Editor’s Note: This post was written by Ro Choy, Chief Revenue Officer of RockYou. In this series, Choy will address the future of social media monetization, focusing on the potential of platforms such as Facebook and the ability for third parties such as RockYou to create their own platforms and monetize a multi-faceted approach to social media marketing.

The Future of Social Media Monetization

Last year (even six months ago) most questioned whether social media could deliver meaningful business results. Whether it was the daily concern over Facebook’s revenue or the questioned utility of social applications, the general consensus was the entire social media industry was hard to monetize.

Today, the huge success of social games, the increasing number of brand marketers using social media and the myriad of business targets that social media leaders are pursuing (payments, e-commerce, search, etc.) are referenced daily. Read more

hi5 is expanding its gaming section with the addition of RockYou’s Pets game to all of its users. The RockYou Pet game has gained a steady following in its own right, so hi5 is seemingly looking to ramp up the offerings of its own game channel by layering in online activity that is sure to keep users around for extended periods of time, with game titles they already know and trust.

For RockYou, the new partnership means that hi5′s 63 million users will be able to access its gaming products. As one of the major application developers, RockYou has been among the first to create game apps for most of the major platforms, from Facebook to MySpace. So it’s no surprise to see RockYou reaching further with the new partnership with hi5.
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