To describe Zynga as a powerful influence on the Facebook developer platform would be an understatement. The company has achieved levels never thought possible. Farmville, the company’s leading application has reached levels that no other developer has ever come close to. In other words, the company is in a league of its own. With over 126 million monthly active users, the company accounts for the sum total of the next three largest developers: Playfish, RockYou, and Causes. So how did the company get to be so large?

The Art Of Chess
If Facebook application development was a chess game, Mark…

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Over the weekend I wrote about the “massive protests” taking place in Zynga’s virtual world YoVille. I kind of poked at the protesters in the article because they are the vocal minority. When you’re in the midst of a protest it appears as if everybody is protesting. The new changes were controversial for those users who had spent time and money on the game over the past year or two. The main issue was that users are now forced to return to the game on a timed basis in order to earn revenue. I’m still not convinced it’s an unfair…

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Zynga, the largest social gaming network on Facebook, appears to be testing a new offers platform on their largest applications. Farmville is by far the largest Facebook application ever and it continues to grow with over 43 million users. So how does the most popular application ever generate revenue? Right now the company is using Offerpal as the primary offers monetization platform but as one inquisitive user noticed, the company appears to be testing out a service by a company never heard of before: “DoubleDing”.

My initial thoughts were that Zynga just cut out the middle man and built their…

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Today Zynga, the leading gaming company on Facebook, blew past the 100 million monthly active users level through their network of games. Much of the support has come from FarmVille which is not only the company’s largest game, but also the largest application on Facebook by an extremely large margin. FarmVille should also become the largest application ever on the Facebook application within the next day or two, surpassing the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application’s previous record of 35,554,755 monthly active users.

Based on daily active users, the application is already the largest ever by a large number.…

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Zynga announced today the acquisition of MyMiniLife, a virtual world which enables users to create their own spaces and homes “through stylized economic activity involving the building of properties and neighborhoods, uploading and selling of useful and fun items, and the buying of objects using MyMiniLife money”. Users start off with a set amount of virtual currency and then can purchase more to add items.

According to Compete.com, the site currently attracts only around 30,000 users per month. Despite the small amount of traffic, the team has built a robust platform. In search of top talent, the company found a…

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Last month I wrote about the fast growing Brain Buddies game which was a remix of “Who Has the Biggest Brain?”, one of Playfish’s top games. Today the developer behind Brain Buddies, wooga, announced that they received funding from none other than Holtzbrinck Ventures, one of the primary investors in StudiVZ, a German Facebook copycat (which was previously sued by Facebook).

I’ve been trying to get information about the size of the investment but the companies are releasing any information. My guess is this is between $500k and the low seven figures given the quality of the company’s first game.…

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FarmTown users have been going crazy this afternoon as the application has become inaccessible to millions of users around the world. FarmTown is currently the most popular game on Facebook according to daily active users and it continues to grow at around 2 percent, or upwards of 300,000 new users per day. So what are the users doing while Farm Town is down? They are refreshing the application to see if it’s back up of course!

While millions of users have found a great way to be unproductive during the day, Zynga is hoping that some of those users come…

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Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.

While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated,…

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