Facebook, Facebook and Facebook again. Seems like you can’t get away from it. O’Reilly now published a report on the widget and application economy of Facebook and the long tail characteristics of which.
Sizes up the Facebook opportunity–who’s making money, and how?
Lays out best practices of marketing with Facebook Applications, aka Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Identifies the top 200 Facebook applications and plots their growth rates
Goes beyond Facebook, and scopes out the emerging widget economy
Not sure if I want to dish out the $150. But if so, it should be worth at least for finding out about what they say for the last point: scoping out the emerging widget economy. This is definitely a trend worth watching!
The shooting car is the central character of a new Xbox game called Yaris that Toyota will introduce today. The game will be offered free to all Xbox 360 console owners in the United States and Canada, who can download it from Xbox Live’s service. It is also the first Xbox game created by an advertiser to be distributed over Xbox Live.
They were not the first to launch such a game, but again, this is a good example of a growing trend:
Advertisers in the United States will spend $502 million on video game advertising this year, up from $346 million last year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Just over half of that is in the form of ads placed within games, and the rest is for marketers to create their own games, known in the industry as advergames.
That this can bei highly successful is proven by Burger King for example, who sold an advergame for the Xbox for $3.5 which despite the price showed a considerable amount of time spent with the game:
Using Xbox data on game use, the Burger King game equates in time spent to more than 1.4 billion 30-second commercials, the fast-food company says.
Imagine that. 1.4 billion voluntary 30 second long contacts – It will be hard for „classical“ advertising to beat that! Both in terms of quantity, as well as quality:
Interacting with our characters in the games is actually more engaging than just sitting back in your chair and watching a Super Bowl commercial,†said Russ Klein, president for global marketing for Burger King.
(On a side note: how does Microsoft track that, anyway? This is scary, once again…)
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