Posts Tagged ‘Social Applications’

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.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Snaptu is a mobile application that everyone who owns a mobile phone absolutely needs to know about, particularly the 4 billion users out there without a Smartphone. What this free app does is bring masses of apps available to iPhones to your regular cell phone, even a $20 dingy old thing you got in Thailand, [...]

If you haven’t heard, Social Times, MediaBistro and AllFacebook will be hosting the Social Developers Summit June 29th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. And on top of that, tomorrow is the last day to sign up for early bird registration and save. If you’re at all involved in the social application developer ecosystem [...]

The MySpace platform has long-been a secondary platform for application developers. The primary reason is that most MySpace applications fail to attract as many users as they do on Facebook. Unfortunately there is no longer any way to determine the total number of users that have ever installed an application on Facebook and as such it will no longer be possible to do an effective comparison of what sites are more effective based on public data.

All we have left to go on is the last total install data that Adonomics provides on their site. According to Adonomics the top MySpace application has over 6.7 million installs whereas the top application on Facebook has more than 46 million. This is the last we’ll ever know about the top number of users a Facebook application has but it’s clear that MySpace is still a fraction of Facebook when it comes to application installs.

How about when it comes to Facebook monetization? According to Alley Insider, Offerpal Media (who is also a sponsor of Social Ad Summit) has been paying developers around $75 per 1,000 daily active users on MySpace and Facebook and $150-$200 for “higher engagement” applications. MySpace is generating about the same amount. So how much does this break down to for CPMs?

No idea because there is no measure of what “high engagement” amounts to on Facebook or MySpace. Both sites are known for having an extremely high number of pageviews and as such this could amount to $0.75 or $75 CPMs. Chances are good that it’s much closer to the former estimate. While some developers are rumored to be generating over $1 million a month on Facebook, the majority are not generating that much off of a single application.

It’s great to see that applications across multiple platforms are monetizing equally, but overall the industry needs to figure out a way to increase the overall CPMs.

Mike Arrington has just posted some new information released by Morgan Stanley regarding internet trends. The report, which is embedded below, states that the current trends online are the widgetization of content, social networking and monetization. One of the most impressive charts is of an Alexa page view comparison among Google.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com and YouTube.com. According to the chart Yahoo is losing substantial ground to YouTube and Facebook.

In comparing the top ranked sites between 2005 and 2008, there has been a substantial shift and now social websites make up the majority of the top 10, accounting for a whopping 7 out of 10 websites. YouTube.com, Live.com, Myspace.com and Facebook.com are the leaders and I would argue that Facebook.com may soon rank up there with YouTube.com given their dominance in social photos and social videos.

Another interesting statistic was that for users aged 17 and up the internet and personal sources ranked higher than television, radio and newspaper as for sources of information. Morgan Stanley suggests that this trend toward source of information accounts for the massive growth in social networks. The presentation also dives into how Facebook is experiencing insane growth and how the top application developers are faring.

One thing that the Morgan Stanley report attempts to explain is why Facebook is growing faster than MySpace. Their conclusion? Facebook has:

• Less intrusive ads
• A personalized newsfeed (which Myspace has recently added as well)
• A cleaner User Interface
• A more prominent friends section – I never thought about this but having a prominent friends section definitely makes a substantial difference. It’s one of the first places I look when viewing a user’s profile.
• A personalized ad platform – The Morgan Stanley report suggests that the Facebook pages are the “personalized ad platform” … I’m not so sure about this one
• Presence on mobile phones

Facebook accounted to almost 10 percent of the report, emphasizing the significance of the rapidly growing social network site. The report also points to major media integration with social sites including Facebook and YouTube. Rather than having the internet, television and mobile being competitive platforms, the report suggests that they are actually complimentary. This is definitely an interesting finding.

Overall, the report was amazingly optimistic on online advertising growth. Some of the numbers are surprising and makes me realize how hard it is to comprehend the significance of such rapid growth. Case and point: there are over 791 million internet users and close to 60 billion hours being spent online globally. Check out the presentation below for more information.