DW fundraising, LJ + games?

[charmian]

1. Dreamwidth is seeking to raise at least $50,000 to replenish reserves. They're looking from some ideas; I didn't really have any that were original (merch, have some kind of paid account sale). Anyway, if you have any good ones that don't involve more features, they'd be interested in hearing from you.

2. http://www.livejournal.com/games/ Looks like LJ has some sort of partnership up. No idea on what the final form is going to take (it hasn't been announced yet IIRC), but so far it appears that, like the classifieds, there isn't much integration of these games into LJ.

This does seem to be somewhat of a missed opportunity, because LJ is in a way a social network, and the integration of social networks and gaming has proved quite lucrative for some parties (although not always ethical). However, without any integration, either of the social graph (i.e., invite your friends, be notified if your friends join), or of actual in-site gaming (gaming is integrated into the site/notifications system), or of payment (using the in-development LJ Wallet or something? I know Facebook is working on some credits system, which people will probably be able to use in their game purchases), I don't think there's any real advantage for either party that wouldn't be gotten from simple banner ads or whatever.

So what games would work well with LJ/DW style sites? I recall a long time ago on LJ people were having some kind of card battle style game where you could 'fight' other random LJers and advance in the rankings. Maybe people would be interested in that kind of simple game, especially if it were integrated into postings etc, but I'm not sure if something THAT elementary would be particularly lucrative.

Back in the day, I also had a blog pet that 'fed' on my RSS feed and would then learn how to 'talk' based on what you posted about; it also could make friends with people you had friended (on the blog pet site), so that you would see your pet hang out with their pets. However, because it was flash/javascript, we could never put these on our sidebars.

And there are those 'dragon egg' things, which I found sort of annoying, because people would just randomly plop them there, so I blocked them with Adblock. However, they achieved some popularity on LJ.

(Which illustrates one of the problems with these games on social networks: to people who are not involved in the game, these gaming elements showing up in their stream are almost like spam, and totally worthless.)

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Just a little digging into the games partnership brings up how it'll make money:

Advertise our games and you will earn not only on every new player (fixed commission for the registration) but also on the revenues which he generates: In the games, the user has many opportunities to pay money (for example for virtual goods or a premium membership). As our partner, you will receive a commission on revenues from these purchases.

Our games are set up to run over the long term. As such, you will receive an additional bonus after one month of activity for each player.

Considering how the links are set up--going to a different page entirely with a "powered by LiveJournal" logo on them--I'd bet this is very close or exactly like the final implementation. I was actually surprised they rolled out the classifieds site in its current dismal form.

[yvi]

Your customers are male and like to play games? Then advertising for cosmetics, epilators, or foam hair coloring are misplaced -- just offer your visitors advertising which they are really interested in, and earn money with it.

...

*blinks*

[afuna]

*twitch*

[charmian]

That makes sense; affiliate commissions. However, I don't really see why they would need to create a 'games' page for it; wouldn't banner ads work just as well? I'm wondering how they're going to sell it to LJ users. Just put it on the extras menu and hope some people wander in? Or maybe this is one of those things that makes more sense from the Cyrillic userbase perspective.

Yeah, it is kind of a weird looking thing. Maybe they're too busy with all of their other deals or something.

[foxfirefey]

Nope. They're going to put it in the extras menu at the very least and mention it in news, of course. I imagine there'll be house ads pointing to it, or at least I'd do that to help drive more traffic--there's your banner ad portion. If they go really aggressive about it, there'll be some widget on the front page promoting it. And they might get aggressive about it--I think there's over $1 involved for every person that registers for one of the top games, and LJ gets a 20% lifetime commission for any purchases that user makes.

Banner ads don't hit that valuable paid/perm LJ population.

[yvi]

0.25€ for signing up + 0.50-1.00€ for the user's first purchase + 20% of anything after that... sounds like there's a lot of money in it.

[charmian]

Wait, they get money even if the user doesn't buy anything? 0_o

[foxfirefey]

Yup! Potentially quite lucrative.

[charmian]

That sounds about right.

Are they really that valuable? Aren't they like only 2-4% of the active LJ userbase? Possibly maybe even 1-2% by this time?

[foxfirefey]

Sure, paid users are a small sliver of the active LJ userbase, but they're a very important proportion and overall much more highly involved with the service than non-paid users.

They also have the very distinct enticing characteristic of having (usually) paid for an account, which puts them into a category of people who have spent money on social media...and have proven themselves to have the ability to.

[charmian]

Ah, a slight irony. Lots of people buy paid LJ time in order to be ad free, but this characteristic makes them more of a lucrative audience.

Though, with the upcoming a la carte userpics, there may be a new category of users who have paid for LJ stuff, yet can be advertised to.

[foxfirefey]

Also, should I quote you as my source for my upcoming no_lj_ads post, eh eh eh? You seem very link-to-me friendly, so I'm going to assume it's okay unless you say it is not!

[charmian]

Certainly! My policy is 'if I wanted people not to look at it, I would have locked it.'

[foxfirefey]

You know, I think I totally picked out the wrong partnership program earlier! LJ's a media partner, not an advertising partner. Which means that LJ gets a portion of all revenue sales and also ad revenue from impressions inside the game:

On the one hand, you as a media partner profit from the revenues on the sales of virtual goods. On the other hand, media partners can successfully market the page impressions of their users in games and as a result earn money even with nonpaying customers.

[charmian]

Huh, that might prove even more lucrative than just taking a cut of the revenue. On the other hand, though, who knows how many people will even try the games?