Social networking and social games
With the emergence of social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Facebook in the past few years they have seen their user base expand to a whopping X million users. Facebook with more than 60 million users is a clear example of the impact of social sites on cyberspace. An increasing number of people continue to spend more and more time on these sites every day. The extent of the influence of social networking can be highlighted by the fact that it is the No. 1 growth area in online marketing.
As the popularity of social websites has grown exponentially various trends have emerged in the virtual community. A rising trend is social gaming with more than a 100 million users who come from all ends of the spectrum. The ability to integrate them on a platform that makes it simpler to play with your friends has contributed greatly to its growing popularity with many people visiting these games more than once.
Zynga, Playfish and Playdom are three application developers who own popular social games Facebook and Myspace and have taken up centre stage in the social gaming space, minting enormous revenues. Farmville, Petville, Cafe world, Zooville, Geocity etc are becoming common names for any regular visitor of Facebook as friends continue to publish stories. With advanced levels, incentives and rewards they keep the users coming back again and again. Addictive and amusing for many, these games have a very large fan base which is expected to grow. And as it continues to grow, so do the revenues it yields.
Comments
Posted On
Jun 10, 2010Posted By
The funny thing about this space is that despite the tremendous dominance of the 3 big players, there is still lots of room for independent developers.
Build a viral application that scales, and the rewards are significant.
It is why we're in this space in the first place.
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