Attention WalMart and BestBuy Shoppers – Facebook Credits on aisle 5
It’s been about nine months since Facebook rolled out its virtual currency, Facebook Credits.
Now the Internet social networking giant will make its Credits widely available in the physical world, by selling them on pre-paid gift cards available at Best Buy and WalMart stores in the United States.
No, you can’t use Facebook Credits to buy a six-pack of beer or a new iPod. The currency remains limited to use in the social games and applications popular on Facebook, where people can use Facebook Credits to buy virtual crops for planting in the Farmville game, for example.
Facebook began selling Facebook Credit gift cards at Target stores earlier this year, but landing on WalMart and Best Buy shelves should vastly expand the availability of its fledgling currency – at the end of 2009, WalMart had more than 3,600 stores in the United States.
Facebook won’t say what percentage of its more than 500 million users currently use Credits, though the company says the idea of selling Credits cards in brick-and-mortar retail stores is to expand access to a broader group of people and to increase the use of Credits.
And with Facebook taking a 30 percent cut of the revenue that application-makers book on transactions involving Facebook credits, the more people that are using Credits, the better for Facebook.
Facebook Credits gift cards will be available, beginning this week, in denominations of $10, $25 and $50 at BestBuy and $5, $10 and $25 at WalMart, with a special $50 card available at Walmart.com.
Investing in the Internet… literally.
The headlines were salacious, the scandal was set. This was going to be the water-cooler story of the week.
27 year-old Erik Novak from British Columbia paid out a record-breaking $330,000 (USD) for a digital space station. Let that sink in for a moment.
A digital space station.
In a video game.
Perhaps even better than all the jokes you and I could write all day was the argument from the company that this was a sound investment.
First Planet Company created “Entropia Universe” and then the “Planet Calypso” massively-multiplayer online videogame to act and feel like a real economy. It has a bank in Sweden with an ATM card and an exchange rate of 10 videogame “PED”s to $1 USD.
from Summit Notebook:
Zynga CEO: Half of social web users will be social gamers
Don’t ask Zynga’s Mark Pincus how much money his company is making.
The founder of the hot social gaming company, which is operating at a more than $200 million yearly run rate according to sources familiar with the matter, said sharing such information would contribute to the kind of hype that would be bad for the nascent industry.
“I just hope that we can all partner to try to get the story out in a balanced way, so that the media doesn’t necessarily have to go back and forth, ‘This is the next great coming,’ and hyping it, and then two or three months later, ‘Oh they didn’t deliver on these very high expectations that we’ve all put out there,’” Pincus said in a conversation with reporters at the Reuters Media Summit.
He noted that Zynga, whose games include FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has been profitable for eight quarters and sees no reason to raise capital in a public stock offering anytime soon.
Pincus did sketch a rosy picture for the broader social games and virtual goods business.
“I believe the addressable market for social gaming will be the whole web and the mobile web.”
“I think that eventually more than half of the population of people who are socially connected with participate in social games.”
Web 2.0: Ning does Virtual Gifts and Demand Media does healthcare
With the Web 2.0 conference about to kick off in San Francisco, Internet start-ups are unveiling new products and tossing out crumbs of data about their businesses intended to illustrate how fast they’re growing.
Social-networking firm Ning led the charge on Tuesday with the news that it has grown 300 percent year-over-year to 36 million registered users and that it is jumping on the virtual goods bandwagon.
The company said it will begin selling virtual goods across the 1.6 million specialized social networks that exist on Ning for $1.50 per gift. The company said it will split 50 percent of the revenue with the Ning network creators who offer the goods on their respective networks.
Virtual goods are increasingly catching on as an attractive revenue stream for Internet companies.
Zynga, the hot videogame maker for social media services like Facebook, said it raised $427,000 from three weeks worth of virtual goods sales on its FarmVille game, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.
Still unknown is Zynga’s annual revenue, which has been estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million in some media reports, but as SAI notes:
By telling us that some of its 59 million monthly FarmVille users spent $427,000 on just one product of the many available in just three weeks (annualized, the number is $7.4 million), Zynga is sending a very clear message: Yo! People really are spending lots of money in our games.
given the size of facebooks reach this is great news but why can’t we tie in on sustainable global projects and assist “United Nations” offering facebook penny credit shares schemes?