Turning social applications into commercially viable ventures is of course why we’re all here investing our time into this fascinating new social network medium.
I have been pondering micro transactions for some time so was pleased to be contacted by Sudha Jamthe and Sumit Gupta with a proposal to evaluate their micro transaction platform, SocialMints.
Our latest entertainment application King of Vegas was an ideal candidate. It allows a new user to play 2 of the 6 available gambling games immediately after installing the application with $250 to wager. Instead of forcing application invites on King of Vegas, we “reward” an invitation sent with $100 with a bonus of $1,000 for every invite that is accepted. The player also earns an additional $250 every time they visit the application within a 24 hour period. As a company we feel strongly that forced-invite applications have a very limited life on Facebook and are not the way to grow a loyal, engaged user base.
http://apps.facebook.com/kingofvegas/
King of Vegas employs several mechanisms allowing the player to “unlock” the other 4 games:
- Earning money playing the 2 “open” games will eventually unlock all the other games so you never have to send an invite if you’d rather invest time playing the games
- If you choose to send invitations, a small number of accepted invitations unlock each game in sequence
- Just sending enough invitations even if they are not accepted will eventually unlock the games
Invitations are an essential part of any successful application strategy but it needs to be a respectful “deal” with your customers. We pay for the creation and ongoing availability of an application for their enjoyment and they repay us by sharing the application. That seems like a fair deal to me.
We worked with the SocialMints team to add another option to unlock the applications. If a player wants immediate access to a particular game why not charge a small fee of $1 to unlock it? I liked the suggestion so we implemented it today (2/13/2008) as an additional unlock mechanism.
King of Vegas is still only a few weeks old so it’s early days but we’re looking forward to seeing if this is an appealing option to our players.
SocialMints integration was not time consuming and our experience with their team has been superb. Their engineers were knowledgeable and extremely responsive. If you are interested in exploring micro transactions check out www.socialmints.com.
“SocialMints helps you to monetize your Facebook Application(s) today. Just like facebook made $24M on virtual gifts last year. Social Mints is the first social currency on facebook with real monetary value. We provide you with payment solution pre integrated into facebook which facilitates secure one click pay on facebook. If you have 100k active users, you could be earning at least $3,000 per month.”
- Sumit Gupta
The micro transaction arena on Facebook is still in its infancy so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Yours Socially,
Mark Wayman
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Nice post. create social application and boost your talent.