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02 Nov 2009 01:07
on November 2, 2009
A big part of the debate about the lead gen scams plaguing Facebook and MySpace via social games is over how much money is being made on these “offers.” Zynga, by far the most successful at building and monetizing these games, is now telling us exactly how much – 1/3 of total revenues, according to Andrew Trader, a co-founder of Zynga.Zynga revenue guesses range all over the place, but are likely $250 million a year or more. That means $80+ million/year is being brought in from legitimate offers like Netflix subscriptions, as well as the really smelly stuff like recurring mobile phone and learning CD subscriptions that trick users into paying big dollars for little or no return value.
What percentage of offer revenue is scammy? We believe it varies over time, and is heading in the wrong direction. Legitimate advertisers like Netflix and Blockbuster, hit with countless laundered subscriptions from repeat subscripers, are said to be dramatically lowering bounty fees paid on signup. Far less scrupulous advertisers like Video Professor and Tatto take their place.
HotOrNot cofounder James Hong said it best in a comment to our post yesterday outlining the scams: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users. Sure we had netflix ads show up, and clearly those do convert to some degree, but i’m pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.”
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Last night we wrote about the lead generation scams within social gaming networks. This is a guest post by Dennis Yu, the CEO of BlitzLocal, a privately held 50 person advertising agency in Denver, Colorado, specializing in local search engine marketing for franchises and professional service firms via Google and Facebook. BlitzLocal is no longer in the business of spam, but they do specialize in Facebook advertising and are now using the platform they’ve developed to run campaigns for big brands and small businesses. Dennis writes a blog at dennis-yu.comDid you know how Mark Zuckerberg supported Facebook in the early days, before he got venture funding? Casino ads. And how about those advertisers who were making over $100,000 a day selling Acai Berry and other weight loss products – they are friends of mine, pioneers of new advertising channels. You see those ads saying “Inbox (5). Nick, someone in San Francisco has a crush on you!” (with your name, profile picture, and city in the ad). I generated millions of dollars from these offers on Facebook – I am not proud of it, but it was very lucrative.
I will walk you through how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks – the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you’re reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is?
In June 2007, Facebook opened up their application developer platform so that anyone could build games on top of the social network. By having access to user data, game developers could instantly make engaging, viral games. Rate who is hottest among your friends, share quizzes, race cars, grow vegetables, and so forth – all with a click of a button. Users in one click gave the game permission to access their profile data and they didn’t think twice about it.
on November 1, 2009
The OWLE team is back at it again, and they never fail to impress. Just a week ago, they announced the availability of the OWLE Bubo, their first product, which turns the iPhone into formidable video camera. Now, Harold Smith and Graham Mcbain have gone a step further. They’ve figured out how to access the 30 pin connector, the connector on the bottom of your iPhone that you use to charge it with, for more then just charging. What Harold and Graham have come up with today, could make video on the iPhone near broadcast-quality.
The idea of the OWLE Bubo is to take your camcorder accessories and let you use them with your iPhone to optimize the iPhone’s video experience. OWLE today posted a video to its YouTube channel (embedded above), explaining what they have achieved. They show a hack of the iPhone that allows it to use audio and video equipment that professionals use for movies.
Brian Solis on November 1, 2009
Facebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée to the future of the social Web as each strive to host, what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others, refer to as our personal social operating system (OS).
What Windows is to PCs and OS X is to Macs, Facebook and Twitter are to our social architecture and enterprise. Certainly there’s a David and Goliath element here depending on which company you immediately view as Microsoft or Apple. However, Mac and Windows are simply operating systems, not networks per se, and that’s where the metaphor of an OS breaks down. Either way, there is the perception that there is a competition between Facebook and Twitter for your attention and your network.
Devin Coldewey on November 1, 2009
There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?
The more salient question is, of course, what are they storing that, by some estimates, is going take up thousands of times more space than all the world’s known computers combined? Don’t think they’re going to say; they didn’t grow to their current level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public.
Daniel Brusilovsky on November 1, 2009
If you are a comics fan, you are going to like this (unless you’re a print purist). Panelfly is partnering with Marvel Comics, one of the largest comic book companies in the world, to bring all your comic book fantasies to the iPhone. Marvel’s line up of comics is quite amazing — the original Spider-Man series, X-Men, X23, Age Apocalypse, and Iron Man. These titles are now being offered in the Panelfly iPhone application, going back to the very first issues. [iTunes Link]
on November 1, 2009
Here are some stories you might have missed this week on CrunchGear.
All about the Motorola DroidHelmet radar: coming to a supersoldier near youSpooky Tesla Radio in a jar
Sarah Lacy on November 1, 2009
I’ve met a lot of expats in my time in China. Some decided to move during an Asian studies class in college. Others decided to move when they saw Mandarin-speaking colleagues getting a promotion over them at work. Still others may have promised a Chinese parent on his or her deathbed to return to the homeland.For Chicago-native Brian Sloan, it was about the time he was being questioned by police for trafficking and dismembering human skulls.
“YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly,” says the site. The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we’re sorting through the Twitter barrage – “is down” is a trending topic right now.
Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn’t a trivial amount of downtime. We’ve asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage.
Update:Erictric says this may be part of a YouTube store rollout. I’m dubious.
Update 2: A YouTube spokesperson says: “We are aware that some users are having difficulty accessing videos on YouTube. We are working hard to fix the issue and will have the site back to normal as soon as possible.”
on November 1, 2009
This guest post is by Adam L. Penenberg, author of Viral Loop.Four months before my latest book hit store shelves, my publisher wanted to change the title. Viral Loop might be catchy, and reflect what the book is about—and isn’t that what a title is supposed to do?—but Hyperion worried that some readers would be put off by the word “viral.” Would they shrink away for fear it was about “swine flu”?
The book looks at entrepreneurs who built multimillion- and in some case billion-dollar businesses from scratch by incorporating virality into their products and businesses. Many iconic companies of our time, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a “viral loop”—to use the product, you have a strong incentive to spread it. At some point, as the number of users doubles, then triples, the company achieves what’s known as a “viral loop,” when the product spreads even if the company does nothing to promote it. The trick is that they all created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.
Guest Author on November 1, 2009Michael Arrington on November 1, 2009
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