Facebook Apps starting to open up new revenue streams

I just logged back into Biggest Brain for the first time in a while and found that they've now launched a premium version of the product that you can upgrade to right within the app. It's only $10/year - but given the marginal cost of nearly $0 that's pure profit; Kudos to Playfish for exploring this new revenue channel as an early mover. I'm a strong believer that during the course of 2008/2009 we will see significantly more advertising-supported businesses open up incremental channels besides banners, sponsorships and lead generation. I'd be curious to get my hands on some of the click rates for this attempt. As a marketer, i'm a big fan of having an upsell on the backend as it makes it easier for me to assign a budget towards getting more installs/ signups on the frontend.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Facebook Apps, Upsell, Social Gaming

Social gaming is the evolution of casual online gaming

Mashable last week has a good post covering the emerging field of social gaming that companies like zynga, and SGN are aspiring to dominate. Zynga etc. are the natural evolution of first gen online casual gaming companies like Oberon Media; whereas Oberon went to portals (MSN) for distribution, Zynga etc. go to the social networks. As far as I know, one of the issues that Oberon is/was constantly facing is that the margins on these games get thinner and thinner as the traffic owner (portal/social network) and the game developer ask for increasingly larger shares of the revenues.
It'll be interesting to see whether they can work out rev-share models that make it attractive enough for all parties (developer, zynga etc., social network) to work together and provide value (read: ways to kill time) to consumers on social networks. Another interesting company in this space is Bunchball which offers a suite of products to help site owners drive engagement through games, rankings and avatars.
As someone on the social network site here at Takkle I'm excited about all of these coming to market as they are developing interesting applications to plug into our network and thus serve our users.