‘Tis the Season: Boost Your Virtual Goods Sales for the Holidays

Introduction

From early in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving to late in the night on Christmas Eve, traditional merchants experience their busiest weeks of the year. According to the National Retail Federation, “For many traditional retailers, the holiday season can represent anywhere between 25—40% of their annual sales.” Retailers often offer generous sales and discounts, conduct special giveaways and promotions, or even launch entire new product lines featuring holiday-themed designs in order to capitalize on consumer’s charitable moods and open wallets during the holiday season.

But what about the merchants that sell virtual goods—the developers of online games and social networks that sell digital items such as virtual gifts, in-game functionality, or decorative goods? What can they do to capitalize on the holiday season?

Our advice: follow these same strategies.

With the holidays fast approaching, it’s not too late to start planning how you can boost your virtual goods sales this season. To offer a few ideas, we took a look at some of the common practices followed by popular social games and virtual worlds during the recent Halloween season.

Tip #1: Introduce Holiday-Themed Items

One of the best and most obvious ways to leverage the holiday season is to introduce a set of specialty items with holiday themes. Think Christmas trees and Menorahs, snowmen and jingle bells – even virtual replicas of those obnoxious sweaters with the flashing lights that somebody’s father inevitably wears to the annual holiday party.

For Halloween, there were plenty of examples of social applications and web sites that introduced seasonal items. The Facebook application Barn Buddy, for example, introduced dozens of spooky or downright scary items users could display on their farms, including haunted barn houses, black cats, “Beware” signs, and the bandage-wrapped arm of a mummy reaching out from the ground.

Similarly, the application Fish World, with 9 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), introduced special Halloween-themed fishes, including a Pumpkin Fish, Skeleton Fish, Zombie Fish, Mummy Fish, Ghost Fish and others.  They also created Halloween-themed backgrounds and decorations for their user’s fish tanks. The decorations came in both regular versions, which could be purchased either through “Coins” (their in-game currency) or “Fish Bucks” (their Real Money Transfer currency) and “premium” versions, which could only be purchased with “Fish Bucks.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are several ways to boost the demand and sale of these specialty items during holiday seasons:

• Promotion: Significant promotion of special items on key pages and during user log-in is critical to establishing demand for them. Also try showcasing users who have purchased these items and the creative ways they have used them on some type of community page or “Leaderboard”-type feature, as this may help draw the attention of other users interested in purchasing similar items.
• Limited Time or Supply: Try keeping specialty items limited in supply (e.g. only 50 pumpkin faces) or offer them for a limited time (e.g. a Halloween shop open for 7 days only) in order to create urgency in the users’ minds. It also positions these items as rare or premium items, which takes us to our next point, about premium pricing.
• Premium Pricing: Just like in real economies, seasonal items should be priced slightly higher than regular items due to the higher demand during a particular season.
• Dual Currencies: It is also possible to balance your dual currencies by allowing users to purchase seasonal items exclusively through Real Money Transfer (RMT) currency in order to generate direct revenue streams or exclusively through in-game currency to increase overall activity and engagement. For further information on managing dual currencies, see our white paper Monetizing Dual Currency Economies in Online Games.

Tip #2: Conduct Holiday-Themed Events

Nearly every holiday has at least one singularly identifiable event, whether it’s an egg hunt at Easter, a cookout for Memorial Day, or a fireworks display for the Fourth of July. By hosting your own such event – virtually, of course – you can get people excited about participating in your application or web site and thereby increase your user engagement, viral distribution and monetization.

The virtual world Gaia Online, for example, holds a special event for Halloween every year. This year’s event was called “DemonBusters.” Taking place over several days surrounding Halloween, it asked users to pick sides between two Gaian demigods who had been fighting for centuries. After picking the “Light Side” or the “Dark Side,” users were asked to complete specific missions that would let them build up their skills, acquire new items, sabotage the enemy and charge up their team’s weapons.

By steering pre-game conversation about the event to the Gaia forums in order to let people get to know their teammates and “prepare for war,” the virtual world increased user activity and peer-to-peer interaction. The event also created a viral distribution channel by encouraging users to rally their friends to join them in battle by promoting it on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and digg.

Other special events that took place around Halloween included costume contests that were held on a large number of applications and virtual worlds. WeeWorld, for instance, allowed users to trick-or-treat in the virtual neighborhood of Woodland Hills, where they could actually walk their avatars up to the front doors of haunted houses for a trick or a treat.

Tip #3: Create Special Tasks, Quests or Missions

Another way to monetize through the holiday seasons is to come up with special holiday-themed missions, tasks or quests for your users to take part in. Consider having them decorate a tree or light a Menorah, and award them with virtual currency when they are finished. Missions like these help deepen user engagement and, if done correctly, can also create a viral channel.

While tasks or missions could be part of a larger event, as seen in tip #2, they could also be as simple as offering virtual currency in exchange for users showing off their avatars on Facebook, as the virtual world Zwinky did during their “Trick AND Treat” event.

Tip #4: Launch a New Product, Feature or Game

Lastly, some developers time the launch of new products, features or entirely new applications around certain holidays. Traditional retailers do this all the time—think of all the toy, food, clothing and entertainment companies that launch new product lines just in time for the holiday shopping season.

In 2008, the social application Hatchlings was originally launched shortly before Easter as Worldwide Easter Egg Hunt, an app focused around the game’s core social feature of users going around and searching for decorative eggs hidden in other users’ profile pages. Today, the app has more than 800,000 very active and very loyal Monthly Active Users, and it has expanded its functionality to let users hatch “cute little critters” and help them collect eggs of their own, hence its change of name.

Just this past Halloween, the app Monster Farm was launched on Facebook to capitalize on both the popularity of farming apps and the holiday tie-in by letting users “replenish the world’s stock of monsters…by farming them.” Launched about a week before Halloween, the app grew to more than 40,000 MAUs in just its first two weeks. Its usage has slipped a bit in the brief time since then, but given the clever design of the monsters and well thought-out mechanics of the game, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it evolve into more than just a one-time novelty app.

Conclusion

The holidays hold plenty of opportunities for social game developers to tap into seasonal themes in order to engage their users more deeply and get them to spend virtual currencies. Obviously, some holidays hold more opportunities than others – Halloween, for example, is probably a better holiday to design a special event or special virtual goods around than, say, Arbor Day (although the latter is an ideal holiday for “green” apps to come up with something special).

The holiday season that includes Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan and others, however, is the most ideal time of year for developers to develop special goods, events, missions or even new games and applications. The tips provided in this white paper are by no means an exhaustive list. We’ll be interested to see what other unique and compelling ideas developers come up with for this holiday season.

Got tips, comments or feedback? Please contact us at info@offerpal.com.

Offerpal Bowling Night

Offerpal Team recently went out for Bowling.

Here are some pics of the team testing their skills in bowling.

Offerpal Issues Advertising Policies

The direct marketing industry, in all channels, is plagued by unscrupulous marketers distributing offers of questionable integrity. Recently, this problem has become spotlighted in the social media. We’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about steps that Offerpal has taken, and will continue to take, to ensure such marketers and offers are eliminated from the social media industry and to protect our user experience.

Yesterday, we became the first “offer” company in the industry to publish our own set of Advertising Policies, which forbid any offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable, while defining clear guidelines and principles for the language and creative of offers which we will distribute. To enforce these policies and standards, we have implemented a multi-step review process which ensures that each and every offer we distribute is in complete compliance with the developers and publishers through whom the offer is being distributed.

This review is conducted before the offer “goes live.” In addition, we are implementing automated processes for continually verifying the current live offer with the approved offer to verify that no changes have been made by the advertiser. And as we have been doing all along, we are personally processing all customer service inquiries to address any inquires from consumers about offers or offer fulfillment.

Throughout the past few weeks, we have remained in very close communication with Facebook, MySpace and the other major social platforms, as well as with the major application developers, to involve them in our compliance process. We are not running any offers that are not clearly compliant with the requirements of these publishers.

On the advertiser side, we have added many high-value new offers into the mix, so that today you will find hundreds of compelling offers from recognizable brands such as Real Networks, ProFlowers, New York Times, DirecTV, Disney, Yahoo, Blockbuster, Netflix, Priceline, Discover Card, Columbia House, Nielsen, Gevalia and many more. We are aggressively adding new offers every day, including exclusive offers that are only available to Offerpal clients.

As our new CEO, George Garrick, mentioned in his open letter to the industry on November 5th, we will do everything we can to lead the industry and set a positive example. Offerpal is in the fortunate position of having more resources than any of our competitors, and we are aggressively applying these resources to take our industry to the highest possible standard of quality and integrity.

Over the next few weeks you will hear much more from us on our progress. We encourage you to contact us if you have any questions or would like to provide feedback on how we’re doing.

Why Virtual economies thrive? – interesting insights from VGS2009

Early this month, Virtual Goods Summit invited thought leaders to share their perspective on Virtual Goods and Virtual Economies. These thought leaders shared from their knowledge in this field.

One such presentation was from IMVU, “An Avatar based social network and 3-D virtual world” by Lee Clancey, VP Product Mgmt an GM for direct revenue. IMVU shared that 80% of their direct revenue comes from consumers. This opens up a window to have an open conversation on how IMVU increases engagement and stickiness.

Below is the presentation: Check out the  key learnings.

Second presentation that looks into “Virtual Goods, how and why they work“, was from Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain. The presentation brings forth how virtual goods in the context of virtual worlds is a social phenomenon – used for shopping, gifting and decorating. Essentially, it is all about PEOPLE.

Below is the presentation: Check out the 5 steps for launching Virtual Goods:

Thought Leadership Series: Challenges of porting games across social networks

Offerpal Media continues to develop its ‘Thought Leadership Video Series .  We sat down with Blake Commagere to talk about various topics. In the first interview, he shared his thoughts on what to learn from the traditional gaming industry. In the second interview, he spoke to us about gamer’s psychology, social networks bringing new audience to gaming and much more…In his third interview, he shares with us the challenges of porting games/apps across different social networks and platforms.

Blake is the creator of the highly successful Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves games on Facebook. Previously, he led the development of the Causes application on Facebook.

EPISODE 1: “What social game developers can learn from traditional games?”

In this interview, Blake revealed his insights on social versus traditional (PC/console) game development.

EPISODE 2: “Are gamers moving away from pricey console games?”

In this interview, he shed light on how social networks bringing new audience to gaming and challenges to traditional game developers.

EPISODE 3:  “What are the challenges of porting games/apps across different social networks and platforms?”

Topics include:
- Lessons learned from Blake’s perspective
- The biggest challenge to porting
- Differences in monetization across networks

osted on October 19, 2009 by myofferpal | Edit

Offerpal Media continues to develop its ‘Thought Leadership Video Series ,‘ in which we will interview some of the foremost experts, entrepreneurs and, yes, “thought leaders” in the field of online gaming and social publishing. In the first video interview, we sat down with Blake Commagere to talk about various topics. In the second interview, he spoke to us about gamer’s psychology, social networks bringing new audience to gaming and much more…

Blake is the creator of the highly successful Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves games on Facebook. Previously, he led the development of the Causes application on Facebook.

EPISODE 1: “What social game developers can learn from traditional games?”
In this interview, Blake revealed his insights on social versus traditional (PC/console) game development.

EPISODE 2: “Are gamers moving away from pricey console games?

Topics include:
- Gamer’s moving away from pricey console games?
- Social networks bringing new audience to gaming
- Challenges to traditional game developers in this new social gaming environment.

An Open Letter from Offerpal’s New CEO

I am the new CEO of Offerpal (as of yesterday) and although I’ve only got 48 hours under my belt, and have entered this industry in the midst of a recent firestorm of controversy, I thought it was time to share some of my thoughts and plans.

Direct marketing, in particular lead-gen, has always been full of questionable, misleading, and outright fraudulent marketers and offers.  We all get these daily via snail mail, email, phone, and late-night TV.  Unfortunately, this is the nature of the Direct Marketing beast.

Although a distribution channel which carries such offers does not actually create the offers, I do believe that a channel that wishes to be perceived as credible and of high integrity does indeed have a responsibility to make sure that the offers it distributes are not deceptive or “scammy.”

Over the last year, the use of offer-based payment systems such as Offerpal has skyrocketed, and it’s pretty clear today that the industry has not kept up with its explosive growth in terms of properly policing the offers that are being distributed.

I am not going to comment on events leading up to this situation, nor on other players in the industry, but I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers.  The policies we’ve had up until now have not been thorough enough to prevent such offers from airing, nor has our organization had the proper focus and accountability to ensure quality assurance over the offers we distribute.

As a result, we’ve had a number of offers which were recently taken down by either ourselves or our partners.  Although we believe that the majority of our offers were valid and not misleading in any way, we have acted conservatively by taking down the majority of our offers and we are now in the process of letting them back into the system after inspection.

However, we’ve also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance.  In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not.  This was not a deliberate tactic of any kind, it was a mistake that reflected our ineffective checks and controls.  But nevertheless, it was an inaccurate claim and for that we take full responsibility, and I apologize to Facebook and to their user community.

The good news in all this is that it has brought to light some very important issues for our collective industry which need to be addressed immediately.   For our part, we will be doing the following:

1. It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.
2. We will individually inspect and approve every single individual offer before it is allowed to go into distribution on our system.
3. We will customize our offer profiles to meet the needs and standards of each partner and will not attempt to have a “one size fits all” approach.
4. We will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts.

Over the coming weeks you will hear much more from us on this issue, but more importantly you will see action and results.  I will remain personally involved in this initiative and consider it one of my highest priorities in assuming my new role here.

Virtual Goods Summit ‘09: What an ending!

Yesterday’s 2nd Annual Virtual Goods Summit was, by all accounts, a wild success. Organizers Charles Hudson and David Sachs once again brought together a who’s who of the industry’s best for a full day of informative, thought-provoking sessions and the most valuable networking opportunities of the year.

The single most talked about moment of the show, however, came at the very end, after the panel on Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods was opened up to questions, when one prominent tech blogger decided to chide practically the entire industry — payment providers, publishers, even the platforms — for what he described as unethical behavior.

The gist of his comments were that (1) payment providers were knowingly allowing children to steal their parents credit cards in order to purchase virtual currency or complete ad offers, (2) advertisers were being scammed into accepting leads (and oftentimes duplicate leads) that had no real interest or intention on following through on the offer, (3) that the game developers and even the platforms themselves were complicit in this behavior because it helped them generate considerable revenues, and (4) that the offers themselves are misleading.

Because our own Anu Shukla represented the only offer-based payment platform on the panel, she was in the best position to address the blogger’s claims. Since this blogger will no doubt use his platform to continue railing against the industry, we’d like to use our own blog to recount Anu’s points and help set the record straight.

1. In defense of the accusation that the industry knowingly allows children to steal their parents credit cards in order to purchase virtual currency or complete ad offers:

As Anu pointed out, this happens in such small quantities that it is hardly worth talking about. Of the millions of transactions Offerpal and other payment providers conduct every month, less than one-tenth of one percent of our customer service inquiries come from parents disputing charges on their credit cards of which they were unaware. Besides, this behavior is hardly unique to the gaming or virtual goods industries. If children are going to “borrow” their parents credit cards, they are just as likely to do so for material goods as they are for virtual goods. Why one tech blogger feels this problem is unique to the virtual goods industry or somehow a reflection on the payment providers who power it is entirely unclear. It should also be pointed out that Offerpal, like many others in the industry, is very proactively fighting fraud at every turn. As Sean Phinney, Playdom’s VP Business Development, pointed out in the press release announcing our suite of security and fraud prevention services, “As social games provide more immersive entertainment, player adoption of virtual currencies will only grow. Given our commitment to delivering a great player experience, Playdom sees this as a high priority issue. We commend Offerpal’s leadership putting safety measures in place to protect our players.”

2.) In defense of the accusation that advertisers are being scammed:

The blogger used the example of gamers signing up for offers from major advertisers such as Netflix in order to acquire virtual currency, only to immediately cancel their accounts and sign up again in order to game the system. For starters, the blogger couldn’t have picked a worse example. Netflix is perhaps the most sophisticated direct marketing advertiser on the Internet. To think that they don’t have a system in place for de-duping leads is ludicrous. And for those advertisers who don’t de-dupe themselves, we have our own de-duping system. Similarly, to suggest that the leads are so insincere and the lead quality so poor that advertisers are being “scammed” is just as erroneous. The truth is that Offerpal works with powerful, big-brand advertisers including not just Netflix but Disney, the New York Times, Discover Card, DirecTV, Blockbuster, Nielson RetRatings, Comscore and thousands of others who are quite happy with the quality of leads we generate for them. It’s not like this is an entirely new channel for them. Many of our advertising clients have been working with us for two years now and have done nothing but increase their orders every month. In fact, most advertisers are finding that the lead quality is by far better than they get through other channels such as affiliate programs, email, co-reg and the like. As we’ve pointed out in a previous blog post Offerpal is 100% committed to generating high quality leads for our advertising partners, and we’ll let the renewing of advertiser insertion orders speak for themselves. If advertisers were not happy with us as a source of consumer acquisition they would have turned us off long ago, since they are the final authority on whether the metrics meet their program goals. With hundreds of millions of ad spend at stake, it is naive to assert that they don’t have appropriate measurement tools in place.

3.) In defense of the accusation that developers and platforms are complicit in allowing this to happen:

Here, the blogger singled out Facebook, stating that they turned the other cheek to all of this “scamming” and “fraud” because they generate such incredible revenues from all of the game developers who pour their money into advertising on the platform. We can only assume that the blogger doesn’t follow Facebook’s policies very closely, or he would be aware that the company is extremely aggressive in enforcing its stringent advertising guidelines, which strictly prohibit anything misleading, unclear or scammy. In fact, as part of their platform changes announced just last week, the company announced that they were doing away with their Application Verification program because from now on they expect all applications — not just verified apps — to conform with these highest of standards as set forth in their Principles and Policies.

4.) In defense of the accusation that our offers are misleading:

The terms for completing every offer in our system are spelled out very plainly and very clearly in the language in our I-frame and on the advertiser’s landing page. We have a full team who constantly scour the offers to make sure they are in full compliance with our policies, which parallel Facebook’s policies against misleading copy or creative. Any landing pages that do not clearly spell out the terms of the offer are instantly removed and the advertiser is banned from our system. Are there some offers that are of higher quality than other offers? Absolutely. Is it our job to police the lower quality offers and remove them from the system, or at least make sure their terms are clearly spelled out? Yes, and we have been working very hard, in conjunction with Facebook and other platforms, to do exactly that.

It is unfortunate that someone from outside the industry decided to use the pulpit offered by the good folks at the Virtual Goods Summit to rail against those on the inside. The good news, however, is that his doing so gives us the opportunity to address these issues. This is, after all, still an emerging industry, and as it grows larger and larger it will attract more and more attention, and it is quite possible that many others outside the industry who do not necessarily know better might share the blogger’s sentiments. But for those on the inside — the payment providers, the publishers, the advertisers and the platforms — we are able to discern the misconstrued perception from reality.

We, personally, would like to thank Anu Shukla for so emphatically and enthusiastically dispelling the myths. Perhaps a sampling of Twitter references to the confrontation sum it up best:

• @TinaTranT: oh my, what a lively end to #VGS09 ! @Arrington and Anu Shukla of @OfferPal throw down. The lady is impressive.
• @milhaus12: just gained a helluva lot of respect for anu from offerpal. #vgs09
• @mitali: An[u] shukla puts arrington in his place!! #vgs09

 

Yesterday’s 2^nd Annual Virtual Goods Summit was, by all accounts, a wild success. Organizers Charles Hudson and David Sachs once again brought together a who’s who of the industry’s best for a full day of informative, thought-provoking sessions and the most valuable networking opportunities of the year.

The single most talked about moment of the show, however, came at the very end, after the panel on Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods was opened up to questions, when one prominent tech blogger decided to chide practically the entire industry – payment providers, publishers, even the platforms – for what he described as unethical behavior.

The gist of his comments were that (1) payment providers were knowingly allowing children to steal their parents credit cards in order to purchase virtual currency or complete ad offers, (2) advertisers were being scammed into accepting leads (and oftentimes duplicate leads) that had no real interest or intention on following through on the offer, and (3) that the game developers and even the platforms themselves were complicit in this behavior because it helped them generate considerable revenues.

Because our own Anu Shukla represented the only offer-based payment platform on the panel, she was in the best position to address the blogger’s hyped up claims. And boy, did she ever. By the time she was finished, the crowd erupted in applause, clearly proud that she had defended the industry so well against these uninformed accusations.

Since this blogger will no doubt use his platform to continue railing against the industry, we’d like to use our own blog to recount Anu’s points and help set the record straight.

1) In defense of the accusation that the industry knowingly allows children to steal their parents credit cards in order to purchase virtual currency or complete ad offers:

As Anu pointed out, this happens in such small quantities that it is hardly worth talking about. Of the millions of transactions Offerpal and other payment providers conduct every month, less than one-tenth of one percent of our customer service inquiries come from parents disputing charges on their credit cards of which they were unaware. Besides, this behavior is hardly unique to the gaming or virtual goods industries. If children are going to “borrow” their parents credit cards, they are just as likely to do so for material goods as they are for virtual goods. Why one tech blogger feels this problem is unique to the virtual goods industry or somehow a reflection on the payment providers who power it is entirely unclear. It should also be pointed out that Offerpal, like many others in the industry, is very proactively fighting fraud at every turn. As Sean Phinney, Playdom’s VP Business Development, pointed out in the press release (http://offerpalmedia.com/offerpal-secure.php) announcing our suite of security and fraud prevention services, “As social games provide more immersive entertainment, player adoption of virtual currencies will only grow. Given our commitment to delivering a great player experience, Playdom sees this as a high priority issue. We commend Offerpal’s leadership putting safety measures in place to protect our players.”

2) In defense of the accusation that advertisers are being scammed:

The blogger used the example of gamers signing up for offers from major advertisers such as Netflix in order to acquire virtual currency, only to immediately cancel their accounts and sign up again in order to game the system. For starters, the blogger couldn’t have picked a worse example. Netflix is perhaps the most sophisticated direct marketing advertiser on the Internet. To think that they don’t have a system in place for de-duping leads is ludicrous. And for those advertisers who don’t de-dupe themselves, we have our own de-duping system. Similarly, to suggest that the leads are so insincere and the lead quality so poor that advertisers are being “scammed” is just as erroneous. The truth is that Offerpal works with powerful, big-brand advertisers including not just Netflix but Disney, the New York Times, Discover Card, DirecTV, Blockbuster, Nielson RetRatings, Comscore and thousands of others who are quite happy with the quality of leads we generate for them. It’s not like this is an entirely new channel for them. Many of our advertising clients have been working with us for two years now and have done nothing but increase their orders every month. In fact, most advertisers are finding that the lead quality is by far better than they get through other channels such as affiliate programs, email, co-reg and the like. As we’ve pointed out in a previous blog post (http://myofferpal.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/offerpals-commitment-to-our-advertising-partners/) Offerpal is 100% committed to generating high quality leads for our advertising partners, and we’ll let the renewing of advertiser insertion orders speak for themselves. If advertisers were not happy with us as a source of consumer acquisition they would have turned us off long ago, since they are the final authority on whether the metrics meet their program goals. With hundreds of millions of ad spend at stake, it is naive to assert that they don’t have appropriate measurement tools in place.

3) In defense of the accusation that developers and platforms are complicit in allowing this to happen:

Here, the blogger singled out Facebook, stating that they turned the other cheek to all of this “scamming” and “fraud” because they generate such incredible revenues from all of the game developers who pour their money into advertising on the platform. We can only assume that the blogger doesn’t follow Facebook’s policies very closely, or he would be aware that the company is extremely aggressive in enforcing its stringent advertising guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php), which strictly prohibit anything misleading, unclear or scammy. In fact, as part of their platform changes announced just last week (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=326), the company announced that they were doing away with their Application Verification program because from now on they expect all applications — not just verified apps — to conform with these highest of standards as set forth in their Principles and Policies (http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=326).

It is unfortunate that someone from outside the industry decided to use the pulpit offered by the good folks at the Virtual Goods Summit to rail against those on the inside. The good news, however, is that his doing so gives us the opportunity to address these perceptions. This is, after all, still an emerging industry, and as it grows larger and larger it will attract more and more attention, and it is quite possible that many others outside the industry who do not necessarily know better might share the blogger’s sentiments. But for those on the inside — the payment providers, the publishers, the advertisers and the platforms — we are able to discern the misconstrued perception from reality.

We, personally, would like to thank Anu Shukla for so emphatically and enthusiastically dispelling the myths. Perhaps a sampling of Twitter references to the confrontation sum it up best:

· @TinaTranT: oh my, what a lively end to #VGS09 ! @Arrington and Anu Shukla of @OfferPal throw down. The lady is impressive.

· @milhaus12: just gained a helluva lot of respect for anu from offerpal. #vgs09

· @mitali: An[u] shukla puts arrington in his place!! #vgs09

Meet Offerpal at VGS2009 and join us at the AfterParty at Harlot

Meet Offerpal at the Virtual Gaming Summit Today, Oct 30th.

Here is the agenda:

VGS: Friday, Oct 30, 2009 from 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM (PST)
San Francisco, CA

The Virtual Goods Summit 2009 is focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.

Here is a link to the event: http://www.vgsummit.com/2009/

Offerpal is sponsoring this event and Anu will be speaking on a panel to share data and perspective with all in attendance involved in the  virtual goods space.

Details on panel below:

5:00 PM – 5:45 PM – Panel: Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods.

Details on the Offerpal VGS after-party, Hosted by Offerpal Media

Time : 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Venue:  Harlot, 46 Minna St, San Francisco.

Date: Oct 30, 2009

Playoffs to win Wii, flip camera, champagne and many more gifts….

You don’t want to miss it.

Here is the link to the event:  http://www.vgsummit.com/2009/after-party

Offerpal completes 2 years and continues to grow

Offerpal is in the news this week as it completes 2 years and on its anniversary it announced that it has issued more than 730 billion virtual points to 160 million consumers. Offerpal helps publishers on Facebook, game platforms, and virtual worlds to monetize their apps.

VentureBeat ran the following article:

Offerpal has quietly built a special offer empire. On its two-year anniversary, the company is announcing that it has issued more than 730 billion virtual points to 160 million consumers.

Offerpal helps publishers on Facebook, game platforms, and virtual worlds monetize their apps. Rather than selling to consumers, it gives them an alternative payment system via special offers, which are targeted ads such as surveys or credit card deals. To gain virtual points that they can spend in a game, users fill out a survey. Advertisers pay Offerpal for each complete survey, and Offerpal shares the proceeds with the app publisher.

So far, Fremont, Calif.-based Offerpal has signed up more than 2,000 publishers. Offerpay has also created a turnkey payment platform that now powers millions of transactions per month. It has payment options in 190 countries and offers in more than 80 countries.

Continue Reading the article on VentureBeat: Offerpal Hits 160 million consumers with special offers

On Reuters: Offerpal Media Marks Two-Year Anniversary with 160 Million Users and 730Billion Virtual Points Issued

On San Francisco Biz Journal: Offerpal Media Marks Two-Year Anniversary with 160 Million Users and 730 Billion Virtual Points Issued

On StartupMeme: Offerpal Media completes 2 years and continues to expand exponentially

Offerpal hits more than 160 million consumers with special offers

the company is announcing that it has issued more than 730 billion virtual points to 160 million consumers. Offerpal helps publishers on Facebook, game platforms, and virtual worlds to monetize their apps.

What the recent Facebook Platform changes mean to you

Facebook yesterday for the first time revealed their 6 month product roadmap, and there was plenty of interesting changes that will affect how game developers communicate with their users, generate new installs, and manage their applications.

One of the most important changes is that developers will now be able to ask users for their email addresses. Basically, this gives the developers more direct communication with their users, or, as Facebook puts it on their blog, the point of the move is “to reduce friction and empower application and Facebook Connect developers to manage their relationship with users.”

Other significant changes coming down the pike include:

• Notifications -  These will be removed, and instead developers will use stream, Inbox, and Email.
• Requests – Will be moved to Invites and Inbox.
• Invites – Will be moved to either a filter in Inbox or surfaced in the Application and Games Dashboards.
• Inbox – Users will be able to share application content with one another via the Inbox.
• Stream – Stream stories will be rendered slightly differently: 1 image, a few lines of text, and 1 action link (without “formatting”-style characters).

It also sounds like Facebook is going to start applying their platform policies more aggressively. They’re doing away with the Verified Application Program, for example, and instead applying the standards for this program to all applications, rather than just the select few that pass. This is all part of the new set of principles they established for developers to live by. 

These are just a few of the changes described at an invite-only Developers Garage hosted yesterday at the Facebook offices. You can watch the entire presentation via ustream. For more analysis, you can also see how VentureBeat, InsideFacebook and AllFacebook covered it.

What all this means to you is that you will have to get more creative in how you grow your app virally and attract more users. Be sure to check out the changes and see how you can utilize new channels like the stream and email to attract new users and build relationships with current ones. This is especially critical because you will no longer be able to rely on notifications and requests, at least not as they currently exist, both of which have been so important to help you acquire new users.

Facebook is constantly changing the platform, and perhaps the best news of the day is that they now plan on releasing regular roadmaps to help developers anticipate these changes and plan for them themselves, rather than just having to react to the changes after they’ve occured. To stay on top of the changes, follow them at the Facebook Developers page.