Determining the ROI on social media is often quite a vague thing. Check out this infographic filled with some of the latest polls and interesting mini-case studies that show support for social media ROI.
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Facebook and NBC are pushing out a radical new partnership for the London Olympic Games. NBC will remind viewers to join the conversation about the Olympics on Facebook, while Facebook will remind users about events on NBC. Find out more about the arrangement here.
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According to a study by PageLever, only five to 10 percent of traffic to Facebook pages comes from external sources. Find about more about what that means here.
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Whether or not you ‘like’ marketing your business on Facebook, your users want to do much more than “like” your business in return – they want to be engaged. Read five tips to gamify your page and do so here.
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Building on the recent results by Ampulum’s recent mobile gamer survey, the company looked at mobile gameplay habits and monetization. Interestingly, Android users were heavier mobile gamers than Apple users; gamers using Android were twice as likely as Apple gamers to spend over an hour per day playing mobile games.
“The OS difference carried over to number of games as well,” noted ‘Steve’ from Ampulum. “13 percent of Android gamers reported playing six or more mobile games in an average day, vs. almost none of those using Apple devices. Apple users were more than twice as likely to play only a single game per day. The Android gamers in our survey were clearly more committed to their mobile gaming hobby.”
Those who were in their 20s were the heaviest mobile gamers, for both number of games played as well as time spent playing games. Those in their 30s were the most likely to play a single game 5-15 minutes per day, perhaps showing increased commitments from work and children during that age.
“Our next target was monetization data,” said ‘Steve. “We asked gamers what fraction of their favorite mobile games were paid apps vs. freemium, and how much money they spent on mobile in-game purchases. We did not observe any significant differences in monetization stats by player age, but the OS data revealed a familiar story: Android users don’t monetize as well as Apple users. Gamers using Android were less likely to have paid apps among their favorites, and spent less money on in-game purchases. At first glance, it looked like the same gloomy picture for Android that we’ve seen described elsewhere.”
However, the study notes that the Android-Apple monetization gap has all but disappeared. The difficulty at current is that making the first purchase is harder in Android since most of those phones do not require a credit card up front, though this should correct itself in time.
“With the increasing competitiveness of the mobile gaming market, developers need all the information they can get to help them reach the top of the charts. We hope the data provided here helps you to understand your target audience better, and reach them more effectively. Happy gaming!” concluded the report.
Source: Ampulum.com
Electronic Arts has announced that those who pre-order the Medal of Honor: Warfighter Limited Edition will gain access to the Battlefield 4 beta in Fall 2013, confirming that game’s existence. The news was “accidentally” leaked onto the Origin store, with an image mentioning the beta access.
“Though Battlefield and Medal of Honor Warfighter each offer players a completely unique experience, they are united by their underlying technology base — Frostbite,” said EA Labels president, Frank Gibeau. “These are two of the hottest shooters, coming together to deliver a one-two punch of action, intensity and shooter entertainment.”
Recently, Ouya founder Julie Uhrman said that the company would seek “additional funds” outside of Kickstarter. She’s now walked back that message in an official statement.
“Let me be clear, Ouya is not seeking additional funding outside of Kickstarter,” read a statement from Uhrman. “Our priority now is to continue to focus on building a great game console while engaging in our on-going Kickstarter campaign. Our intent in going to Kickstarter was to raise money that would take us from functional prototype to product on the market.”
“With respect to our funding, we have been candid in disclosing an early round raised through friends and family that included backing from investors like Digg founder Jay Adelson, Flixster founder Joe Greenstein, and Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman,” she added. “We do not intend to engage in any conversations related to funding while we are on Kickstarter. And, it’s not like we are going to start speed dialing VCs as soon as the Kickstarter campaign ends. Once our Kickstarter campaign closes funding our priority will be getting Ouya to market, and delivering the best game experience possible. Fundraising will not be top of the list.”
Source: Develop
Miniclip, with over 70 million unique visitors a month and 800 titles available, has relaunched with more connectivity with mobile and the Miniclip Games Platform for developers. The Miniclip Games Platform adds a new micro-transaction system and new APIs, as well as the ability to run real-time game tournaments.
“Miniclip’s new, premium website design gives players a single destination where they can find and play high-quality and popular games, further achieving our goal to provide the best games ‘any time, anywhere on any device,’ ” said Miniclip CEO Robert Small. “We have games for all players, casual to hardcore, to play on their platform of choice and then share their experience on their favourite social network.”
“Our previous site became a kind of Frankenstein monster, with a lot of things bolted on it,” he added. “We wanted to create a new site with improved loading speed, personalised content, and more social hooks.”
Source: GamesBeat
The free-to-play revolution that has struck PCs and mobile phones has only made a few steps into the console gaming sphere. However, Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley likes the long term prospects of F2P on consoles.
“It’s 70 per cent of the audience. Free-to-play on PlayStation 3 is huge,” said Smedley . “In fact, right now, it’s us with DCUO and Free Realms and our friends at CCP with Dust 514 that are going to prove that this market really works.”
“There’s a lot of people that go through that store and it’s so easy to find and download these games that it’s a great business model. A lot of people have already stored their credit card information so it’s very frictionless if they do want to buy something,†added Smedley. “We can put out thousands of items and it feels very frictionless. The remarkable thing is with a game like Free Realms where there’s literally thousands of items to buy it, has to be a solid platform to begin with to support that. It’s no small thing to be able to that. It’s a business model of the future.”
“I admit there was a mindset where when you use the word ‘free’ people pause. ‘Wait a minute, what do you mean by free ‘ But even then people want to see the results. With DC Universe Online the split that we’re seeing ended the debate right there,†he asserted. “Free-to-play is the ultimate expression of a free market in video gaming. It’s completely about quality, there’s no purer way to see whether you have a good game or not than by saying ‘this is free, do you want to play it ‘ I would argue that free-to-play is much more pure than regular games because with those marketing can determine who picks up the game.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
Marissa Mayer has been named the next CEO of Yahoo. Known to many as employee No. 20 at Google, she’s been one of the few public faces of the company, and her hiring is considered a surprising coup for the struggling Yahoo.
Mayer, along with being part of Google’s inner circle, was key in spearheading the company’s famously simplistic looking search homepage, Gmail, Google News and Google Images. She has be more recently been put in charge of the company’s location and local services, including Google Maps, overseeing more than 1,000 product managers.
This is a sign that Mayer is looking to expand out after being named to Wal-Mart’s board of directors. She also joins a club of top executive women in Silicon Valley, including Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Virginia Rometty, the head of IBM, and Sheryl Sandberg, who is Facebook’s chief operating officer.
Mayer said she “had an amazing time at Google,” where she has worked for the last 13 years. Still, ultimately “it was a reasonably easy decision” to take the top job at Yahoo, noting that Yahoo was “one of the best brands on the Internet.”
Mayer wants to attract other top talent to Google. “Talent is what drives technology companies,” she said.
Of the partnership with Microsoft for their search engine Bing, which was forced by Google, she said, “I actually think the partnership has been a positive [for Yahoo.]”
While Yahoo used to be a leader in the sphere of the Internet, since 1995, the company has had at least seven different permanent and interim chiefs and the company’s shares have fallen 41 percent over the last 5 years. “In the last few years, given the turnover, there has been a lack of attention on the user experience,” David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo who still works at the company, said in an interview. “We need to get back to basics.”
Source: Dealbook
