Here is my presentation about virtual goods business models and pirate metrics (AARRR) from the Webinale conference

Nowadays, a fan page on Facebook is a must-have for every brand. Having a fan page alone, however, is not enough. A brand also has to activate and constantly engage its fans. It’s about turning passive fans into active brand advocates, who recommend the brand to their friends.

The website Kino.de attracts more than 4.6 million visits each month and it is the leading movie and cinema related website in Germany. The company behind Kino.de, Gruner + Jahr, is publisher of leading b-to-b and b-to-c print magazines with focus on films. With Kino.de, it also takes advantage of Facebook and so far, it has attracted more than 5000 fans, which makes it the largest German language movie  fan page on Facebook.

To further grow and engage its fan base, Kino.de now partners with SnipClip. The result of this partnership is a digital collector’s album featuring the movie highlights in March:

The collection consists of eight movie recommendations made by Kino.de. Each collectible shows the trailer of a recommended movie. Users gather “movie stars”, an in-game currency that they then exchange for collectibles. The goal of the users is to complete the collection. If they do so by March 25, users have the choice to enter a sweepstakes and the chance to win a Blu-ray DVD player and free movie tickets.

In order to have more trading partners for their duplicate collectibles, users want their friends to participate the game. Jointly, they will also be able to gather more movie stars. As a result, users are highly motivated to invite their friends to the game and thus, they spread the brand across their social network.

Growing the fan base is one goal. Activating and engaging existing fans is another one. Therefore, Kino.de also publishes bonuscodes that can be redeemed for collectibles on their fan page:

The availability of codes is limited and only the fans who click the link first get a copy of a specific collectible. As shown in the picture above, fans like those activities and they also comment on them. This results in increased exposure of the posts and the Kino.de. Further, it increases the value perception of being a fan: as a fan you receive bonuscodes automatically delivered to your Facebook news feed.

This leaves us with inviting you to become a fan of Kino.de, to play the collecting game and hopefully, to win one of the valuable prizes. Good luck!

To promote the German version of latest Disney documentary Oceans on Facebook, the leading independent film distributor in Germany Universum Film decided to create a digital collector’s album using SnipClip’s unique distribution plattform. The “Unsere Ozean Fanbook“ contains impressive underwater pictures of eight different sea animals, such as dolphines or rays.

Each collectibles educates the user in an entertaining and playful way about some very surprising facts of the underwater world. For example, did you know that dolphines are not much into loyalty, but practitioners of free love?

The motivation for the users to engage with the film in form of a collecting game is threefold:

1. Users enjoy high resolution pictures and learn exciting facts about life under water.
2. They participate in a sweepstake to win theater tickets and Oceans DVD special editions.
3. Users interact with their friends to trade duplicate collectibles and compete with other collectors in a playful way to complete the collection.

The film distributor benefits in various ways:

1. Branding and Involvement: a SnipClip powered collecting campaign creates high user involvement and a positive brand image.
2. Engagement and Retention: of course, there is also an official Oceans website and Facebook fanpage. SnipClip allows to integrate both in the campaign, e.g. by posting bonus codes for free collectibles on each of them. As a result, fans are engaged in the campaign and at the same time motivated to come back to the film’s website and Facebook fanpage.
3. Viral Growth and Brand Recommendations: users gift duplicate collectibles to those of their friends who will appreciate them. Thus, they invite new users to join the game and help the marketer to identify the target group  (crowd targeting). The recipient perceives the invitation as a (branded) gift or a recommendation from a friend, not as advertisment. As a result, these socially endorsed gifts increase the acceptance and the click rate significantly.

Get in touch with us to learn more about branded virtual collectibles and gifting campaigns: marketing@snipclip.com.

When you want to send a friend a virtual gift, Facebook now splits the gift dialog into different sections:

Click on Sport and Celebrities and you find a variety of branded virtual gifts:

Do you think those branded virtual goods are attractive to the Facebook users?

During the past months, our trainee Matthias analyzed the virtual goods market, especially in the area of social gaming, social networks and virtual worlds. Today, SnipClip announced at the GamesBeat conference, where Oliver will pitch for SnipClip at the Who’s Got Game competition, that it will publish the results. The press release highlights some interesting insights:

Average revenue per monthly active user per year:

• non-gaming social apps: $0.37
• social games: $3.65
• virtual worlds: $8.04

Market potential for 2008:

• non-gaming social apps: $215 millions
• social games: $340 millions
• virtual worlds: $244 millions

It’s all about luck – and an open mind! When we decided to apply for EXIST we had to find a mentor from a university in Munich. This is one condition for getting financial support from EXIST. The mentor should be an expert on our field of business activity. However, finding an expert on the virtual goods business in Germany isn’t that easy! But, we had luck and a smart trainee, Matthias.

Matthias is doing his Diploma thesis about virtual goods in online communities at SnipClip and he was interested in participating at the Virtual Goods 2008 conference. On the conference website he discovered that Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess, who is a member of the conference’s program committee, is also the director of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München! So we emailed Prof. Hess, met him a week later, pitched our idea to him and finally we had found our mentor!

Prof. Hess is the perfect mentor. He immediately understood our concept and business model, but even more important he gave us valueable feedback and provided us with insights about the media industry. Even more better, he and his team meet us every two months to discuss relevant topics. So we did not just found a mentor but a mentoring team! Here you see a picture of Prof. Hess and his team (not all are involved with us).

Of course, the team of Prof. Hess will also benefit from SnipClip. We will provide them with insights on our virtual goods business. I hope there will be one day also a scientific publication covering those insights. Be sure, we will let you know when it is published. So stay tuned and have a good time!

Today, I participated at the first Web Montag in Augsburg, my home town. About 35 web developer, designer and business people joined the event at the Capitol. The event was organized by WEKA – thanks to the organizers! The next Web Montag will be held in March and again organized by WEKA.

Despite the strong interest for the first Web Montag in Augsburg, I was the only one presenting at the event. My presentation was about social games and virtual goods. Some people from the audience asked me for the slides. So here they are:

If you want to know, how to get millions of virtual dollars, watch this. Very funny

On my search for revenue numbers from virtual good sales I stumbled many times across the figures of Tencent. Yesterday for example, I watched the presentation of Susan Wu on the Le Web conference. She mentioned that Tencent has revenues of $1billion and 70% come from sales of virtual goods. I doubt that this figure is true.

Let´s have a closer look.

I think the number is derived from the press releases of Tencent. In 2007, Tencent published that they generated $344.1M revenues from their Internet value added services (that is 65% of their $523.1M total revenues). In the three of four quarter results of 2008 (1st, 2nd and 3rd) Tencent announced that they generated $644.1M revenues from their Internet value added services (68% of their $943.1M total revenues)

The question is: what are these Internet value added services? Tencent aggregates QZone, QQMembership, QQShow, QQMusic and QQLive in their Internet value added services. I doubt that all of these services have revenues from virtual goods. I am also confused that Tencent´s instant messaging services are not included in the Internet value added services. According to Susan Wu the most virtual goods revenues of Tencent come from the instant messaging services.

In my opinion it is unclear how much of Tencent´s revenues are generated from virtual goods. What do you think? Am I missed something here?

Good bye and stay tuned.

Microsoft published the presentations from the Xtopia conference as online videos today. Here is the online video from my presentation about making money with virtual goods in social communities:

“In den USA beläuft sich der Umsatz mit virtuellen Gütern bereits auf über eine Milliarde Dollar, dann muss in Deutschland doch auch Geld damit zu verdienen sein“ erläutert Martin Szugat seine Motivation für SnipClip.com. Zusammen mit zwei Freunden gründete er SnipClip.com und konnte jüngst die ersten Startup-Preise sammeln. Social Communities erfreuen sich immer größerer Beliebtheit und daher müssen sich nach Meinung von Martin Szugat alle Händler und Marken mit ihnen auseinander setzen. „Wenn wir unsere digitalen Produkte verkaufen wollen, müssen wir in die Social Communities, dort sind unsere Kunden. Außerdem setzen wir auf die Sammelleidenschaft der Deutschen.“, Im Rahmen der Microsoft Gründerinitiative wird SnipClip.com uns ihre Lösung für den „realen“ Vertrieb von virtuellen Gütern auf der Social Community Plattform Facebook zeigen.

“unternimm was.”- die Microsoft Gründerinitiative: Startup3: SnipClip.net – Geld verdienen mit virtual goods und social communities

The introduction is by Carsten Rudolph, head of the “Unternimm was”. initiative of Microsoft. “Unternimm was.” supports startups not only in a technical way, what most people would expect, but also in business development. So thanks Carsten for your support!