If you have been around the mobile or Facebook games arena, you?ve probably heard about the phrase monetization. To put it in short it refers to ways of earning money from your mobile or Facebook app. This word was first mentioned as a result of an interesting situation that applications developers were facing in their first days in this market they were getting huge amounts of users but could not figure out how to make money out of it. This also refers to casual games that were gambling oriented, such as blackjack or texas holdem, but in a fun mode. Their main source of income was ad placement in different parts of their app. All this took a turn when one of the pioneers in this market figured out how to make money, and a lot of it, from these casual games. This of course refers to Zynga poker. Actually, plenty of games developers use Zynga to learn how to monetize their application and turn it from a nice to have and impressive app, to a highly profitable one.So what is going on these days in mobile and Facebook apps
Monetizing has developed quite a lot since its first ad placement days. Actually, ad placement is considered the least preferred format of monetizing. These days you have a completely different approach that is based on offering virtual merchandize to users. Those merchandize can appear in different formats: from tips for reaching a higher playing level to online playing chips. The challenge is to figure out what is the thing which the players will agree to purchase while using your game. A fantastic, fairly recent, example is the ?Manager? app which runs both on Facebook and on mobile. It is an app in which you manage a football team and run soccer games. You don?t see an actual game happening, however, you can update your strategy while it takes place, train players, buy players and just about do whatever a real live soccer manager does. The monetizing in this application is very sophisticated you can enjoy the game for free for as long as you which and you can win your first league this way with no problem. But as you go on to a more advanced stages, the tournaments become harder to win. You have to think about better strategies and mainly get better football players. In order to buy good players you need to have tokens which you must buy with real cash. The moment you have had a taste of the game and the win of a championship, you?re very likely to invest cash in order to continue to play and win. It is a basic foot in the door technique, and it works great.The next step of monetization
The thing that was, till just recently, a huge taboo in the world of mobile and FB applications, is slowly finding its way to safe grounds. This obviously refers to the possibility to play games for money, real cash that is. Until now the only possibility to do that is finding known online gambling sites that offer a mobile variation for their games. But that is going to change. Around the end of 2012, Zynga has issued a press release stating that they are joining forces with Bwin.Party and are starting a process of turning their games into gambling games. They did not say anything yet about a formal release date, but the fact that they have issued such controversial news is enough to state that they mean business. Alternatively, they?re just might trying to create a buzz which might help them sniff around and check the reactions of the industry to such a change. The interesting thing about this is they completely avoided the use of the word gambling in all of their publications. They constantly prefer to use a more innocent term real money gaming. In any case, this publication opens a new window to a frontier where no mobile or Facebook developer has ever gone before. Only time would tell if it?s a false alarm or this is going to become a reality.
About the Author:
Daniel Craigen is an app developer who's been in the mobile and Facebook gaming industry for the past 4 years. You can find more articles by him in his site, where you can play and win with full access to a Real money gaming experience as well as free casual games.
