If the question of “Do virtual gifts hold real world value?” was still on the table, this past Sunday’s Mother’s Day landslide of virtual goods sales should effectively put this question to bed. For good.
TrialPay conducted a study over the past weekend to measure Mother’s Day campaigns launched by a number of social games on Facebook.
According to TrialPay’s research, the week leading up to Mother’s Day (May 2 – 9), saw about $1 million per day generated by “gifts for mom” promotions that saw offers from online flower merchants reward in-game virtual goods and/or currency. This represents a 5x increase in normal social gaming revenues, with the added bonus 40 percent of purchasers were first-time buyers. If this wasn’t enough good news for publishers, TrialPay also found that visitor conversion rates were doubled. It’s a fair statement to make that virtual goods and gifting have reached the tipping point.
Mother’s Day saw attention from more than 40 percent of the top 50 social games on Facebook, garnering in total, approximately 80 million daily users’ eyeballs in the week preceding the holiday event.
“Seasonal campaigns around holidays can present a significant source of revenue for game publishers. Mother’s Day is the 2nd-largest gifting holiday in the U.S. – our study shows that social gaming companies took advantage of this opportunity to convert more of their users to paying customers,” said Alex Rampell, CEO of TrialPay. “Social games companies have been primarily focused on engagement and viral sharing, and they’re just starting to experiment with monetization, so this is an early indicator of big things to come.”
Tags: Facebook, monetization, social game, virtual goods
