The primary revenue streams of social apps are virtual good micro transactions and advertisments. Basically users can play games for free but there are some paid items. If users want to get them, then they have to pay for them. That’s how social apps make profits.
This is an important theme so there are many large summit and news sites which are specialised in virtual goods.
http://www.virtualgoodsnews.com/
http://www.vgsummit.com/2009/
Some virtual goods are called “virtual gifts” which is a simple service where you can send pictures to friends. There are lots of people paying to just send pictures to other friends.
Facebook also offers virtual gifts and it is an important part of their source of revenue.
Facebook is testing virtual gifts.
Istpika has tested virtual gifts for the last month. Here is our report.
True Happy Aquarium in fishville Island Paradise
In accordance with the increase of the number of fish apps such as HappyAquarium on Facebook, we made a virtual gift app which you can send pictures of fish with.
Because it was made with GiftCreator (well-known on Facebook as you can make gift apps simply and quickly with), it was not exactly developed by Istpika .
The result is, it’s already got 178,074 MAU since the start on 02/Nov.
The most popular fish is this one.
Not sure why. I don’t think this fish is anything special.
The title of this fish is “modestly”. Senders can send it casually and they might have sent it “modestly”. This could have been the reason why this fish was the most popular. We titled the fish using adverbs at first . We thought it would sound poetic and cool.
Other titles we used are “fluently” and “selfishly”…
… might have been a bit too much…
Do users use this app considering the gift names?
With gift apps, are titles so important as well as pictures? Do senders care the meaning of the titles when they send them?
To verify the influence of the titles, we made an experiment.
We changed the titles of some of the fish from “poetic message” to “direct message”.
The result was:
There are apparent changes.
It looks like users declared their love or comfirmed they were alive or dead to each other.
The users use social apps casually so it seems like they prefer simple and direct message not significant message you have to think about what the senders really trying to say (and maybe they want humour in their messages!?)
We expect that not only virtual games but also virtual gifts will be spread out in the world from now and we’ve been focussing on them. In social games, whether you send a cow or an energy pack, it’s all the one similar gifting function. To get more users, we keep trying to gain know-how.
