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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Personera Receives $1.4 Million in Funding to Create Merchandise for Facebook Pages

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:57 PM PST

Personera is a free Facebook application that allows Pages to create and sell custom calendars and other physical merchandise that integrates user content. Today it announced that it has received $1.4 million in funding from Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa, a South African firm backed by SAP’s co-founder Hasso Plattner. Personera could use the funding to increase the variety of its product offering, court more Facebook Pages, and grow its head start in the branded Facebook-content merchandise market.

The ability to make physical prints of Facebook photos has become popular lately, with apps like Gifted offering posters, mugs, mousepads, and magnets. CVS now allows users to upload photos through an app and pick up prints at a nearby store, while the new HP ePrintCenter makes it easy to print Facebook photos at home.

The merchandise model is lucrative to Pages looking to monetize their fans bases, as they can use print products as both a revenue source and a way to get their brand name inside people’s homes. However, it’s Personera that makes the bulk of the money, since Pages only receive a maximum of 25% of what customers pay for the goods. To help achieve wider distribution, Personera has partnered with Facebook Page tab application marketplace AppBistro.

When users visit the Your Calendar tab application on the Page of one of Personera’s clients, such as Woolworths South Africa or Fitness Magazine, they’ll grant the app extended permissions that allow it to pull their photos and the birthdays of their friends. The Page’s selected photos are shown full size,thumbnails of user photos appear at the beginning and end of each month’s calendar page, and birthdays are listed on the appropriate days. Users can opt to customize exactly which photos they want to appear, view or download a preview, and order a physical calendar for $19.95.

Personera will have to ensure that it doesn’t violate Section I.4 of Facebook’s Platform Policy that stipulates, “if you offer a service for a user that integrates user data into a physical product (such as a scrapbook or calendar), you must only create a physical product for that user’s personal and non-commercial use.” If users buy in bulk and resell the calendars, Personera could have to answer to Facebook’s enforcement team.

While Personera has an interesting business model, going through Pages instead of directly to users, its high 75% margin leaves it vulnerable to being undercut. Users may also want a better balance between branded and their own content. There is still plenty of room in this market for applications that integrate user content in a more innovative manner, especially since Facebook now allows high-resolution photo uploads.

TrialPay Partners With Facebook to Bring DealSpot In-Game Offers to Developers Using Credits

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 01:41 PM PST

TrialPay has partnered with Facebook to offer its new DealSpot in-game offers API to developers using Facebook Credits. With the new integration, developers place a custom icon within their game that when clicked shows users a targeted offer to make a purchase or watch a video in exchange for Credits.

DealSpot was released in beta two months ago, and has since been integrated by 50 games from many top developers including Playdom, Crowdstar, LOLapps, Kabam, and Wooga. TrialPay also provides versions that support direct payments instead of Credits, and that can be implemented as display ads alongside games instead of within them.

Access to this pipeline of aggregated deals has allowed beta partners including Playfish to generate up to over twice the revenue of their standard offer wall, and up to 8 to 10 times that on holidays according to a participating developer. DealSpot benefits advertisers, developers, users, and Facebook by helping gamers spend more Credits so they can progress in their favorite games.

Facebook has not given any indication that it plans on working with any other offers networks, creating a tremendous distribution advantage for TrialPay.

Implementation

To use DealSpot, developers design their own custom in-game icon that attract users with headlines like “Earn Credits” or “Deal of the Day”. The SWF icon only appears if TrialPay has deals available.

When clicked, developers call the DealSpot API and pass along their app_id and the user’s unique third-party identifier and are returned an targeted offer based on geography, transaction history, and the developer’s preferences such as excluding a certain type of deal.

DealSpot returns high-value, time-sensitive offers from group deals providers like Groupon and Living Social when possible, or holiday-themed offers like sending flowers for Valentine’s Day when appropriate. Otherwise it rotates through deals worth fewer Credits such as watching a Toyota or Dell commercial.

Users see the deal in a pop-up overlaid on the game’s interface, and can click to view alternative offers. Once they complete the offer, users receive the specified number of Facebook Credits and resume the game where they left off. Developers can find additional implementation details and sample code through a link to DealSpot in Facebook’s Help Center.

Performance

Developers can use DealSpot to fill their vast inventory with  a constant stream of offers from a variety of providers, yet they’ll only have to design a single set of graphics and work with a single intermediary. This frees up production teams to design lucrative virtual goods and reduces the need for a large sales team.

Reports from developers who’ve implemented DealSpot show that over time they’ve doubled revenue compared to that earned on an offer wall in the traditional Credits purchase flow. DealSpot attracts a different audience to become paying customers, evident since offer wall revenues aren’t cannibalized.

Saby Agarwal, Director of Payments at Playfish says that Dealspot “encourages players to return daily to check whether new deals are available, which means Playfish can increase engagement and loyalty." Playfish’s Valentine’s Day DealSpot campaign with ProFlowers sold tens of thousands of real bouquets, and accounted for half the total revenue the game generated during the two-week promotion.

Benefits

Advertisers seeking to reach up to hundreds of millions social gamers a day can do so through DealSpot. They’ll only need to work TrialPay to receive placement on some of the Platforms top properties, and it will be easy to achieve performance goals since users are incentivized to convert or engage with branded content.

Users who never considered paying for social games, and therefore never encountered the traditional offer wall in the payment flow, will come across DealSpot during normal play. Once given the chance to earn Credits through purchasing valuable deals, or for free without a credit card by watching a video, they may enjoy the enhanced gameplay and become lasting members of the virtual economy.

For Facebook, DealSpot represents a new way to expose more users to their virtual currency system in a way that doesn’t hurt developers like free promotional Credits did. Its hoping users will become hooked and continue completing offers for Credits or buying them directly, earning Facebook 30% of their value.

Facebook is strongly encouraging implementation of DealSpot, sending several top developers this PDF guide to TrialPay’s new payment system with the tag line “An Exciting New Way to Monetize Your App”.

Facebook Makes Its Presence More Deeply Felt Among Smart and Feature Phones

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:30 AM PST

Being the most downloaded app in the world by a longshot is not enough for Facebook.

A suite of innovative partnerships unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and confirmed in a Facebook Blog post this week is pushing the company’s social networking features deeper into mobile devices at all price points. This will not only potentially bring tens of millions of brand new users on-board, it will also more deeply intertwine Facebook in the everyday lives of its active users in the developed world.

The word “Facebook phone” remains a sticky subject, as the company is cautious about irritating partners. Handset-maker HTC stopped short of using it, while Facebook’s head of mobile products Erick Tseng has joked that Gemalto turns every phone into a Facebook phone.

Low-End: Gemalto created a SIM Card with Facebook embedded inside, meaning that features like friending, status updates, wall posts and messages are available to all SIM-compliant phones even if the owners don’t have a data plan.

This could help Facebook reach tens or hundreds of millions of new users in developing countries, who may carry mobile phones but have yet to sign up for a data plan. Given that growth is largely tapped out in the U.S. and Western Europe, Facebook is relying on these emerging markets to grow beyond 600 million users.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

onsdag den 16. februar 2011 at 07.46