Tag: Facebook

Zynga shifts focus to mobile games

Zynga has been experiencing a significant amount of turbulence in the social gaming space recently. The company made its fortune through Facebook with its vast portfolio of social games. Last year, however, Zynga suffered a proverbial fall from grace as consumers abandoned the company’s games and Facebook stopped showing exclusive favor to the developer. Zynga has adopted a new approach to gaming in an effort to reclaim its throne and has shifted focus to mobile games.

Social gaming takes a back seat

According to the company’s latest financial earnings report, Zynga saw revenues of $311 million in the fourth quarter of 2012. The company experienced a net loss of $48.6 million during the same period. Revenues have been stagnant for the company for several years, but in-game sales have dropped by 15% throughout 2012. For the company to reclaim its place in the game industry, it will have to make a big splash in the mobile games sector.

Zynga working to break into the mobile space

Zynga has already aligned itself with a mobile-centric focus. The company has a workforce of approximately 20 developers working exclusively on mobile games. The rest of the company is focusing on the business aspects of entering into the mobile space, such as marketing, developing better in-game monetization schemes, and working to build new mobile deployment platforms for its upcoming games. Though the company has adopted a very strong focus on mobile games, it is unlikely that Zynga will abandon its social games any time soon.

Social games not likely to be abandoned by the company

Though Zynga may have lost a great deal of favor with consumers over the past year, the company still boasts of more than 298 million monthly active users for its games. Most of these users come from Facebook, where the company’s most popular games are still featured. For its mobile games, Zynga will have to find a new publisher, as Facebook has shown wariness of supporting the company’s titles and the fact that the social network has a very limited presence in the mobile gaming sector.

The leading social media network has increased its advertising spending limit twice over.

Facebook Inc. has just revealed that the mobile marketing budget for the next quarter will be double that of what it was during the previous quarter, as it aggressively moves forward into the smartphone and table environments.

The social network leader has stated that these devices are among its primary goals.

Though Facebook has been experiencing considerable growth through its mobile marketing, last quarter’s progress was not as great as some of the more aggressive estimates from Wall Street had predicted. The company has expressed that broadening its reach through smartphones and tablets will be a vital step as a rapidly growing percentage of its more than one billion global users start to access their profiles by way of these devices.

The company’s mobile marketing business overall grew at the fastest pace it has seen since last May.

It was in that month that the initial Facebook public offering occurred. This mobile marketing growth assisted the business in growing its revenues by 40 percent. Those achievements were considerably greater than the targets set by Wall Street.

Just ahead of this announcement, the shares of Facebook had been riding steadily at $31.24 (US). However, immediately following the release of the new doubled mobile marketing budget, the shares dropped 8 percent, only to recover after hours that day. According to an analyst from Raymond James, Aaron Kessler, “Overall solid quarter but maybe high expectations going into the quarter.”

Facebook, itself, has stated that 23 percent of its total ad revenue comes from its mobile marketing business. This represents a considerable increase over its 14 percent from the third quarter.

Kessler also pointed out that he, and some other investors, may have been expecting more substantial results from the mobile marketing business. He stated that “Mobile revenue was expected to be a little higher.”

Facebook’s finance chief, David Ebersman, was the one to express that the social network had “basically doubled” its mobile marketing ad revenue from the Q3 2012 to the last quarter. He pointed out that half a year ago, there was no revenue over that channel at all, but that “In the course of a pretty short period of time, we’ve dramatically ramped up our ability to monetize mobile.”