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:
Users enjoy high resolution pictures and learn exciting facts about life under water.
They participate in a sweepstake to win theater tickets and Oceans DVD special editions.
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:
Branding and Involvement: a SnipClip powered collecting campaign creates high user involvement and a positive brand image.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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?
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.
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!
For our German readers: here is the abstract for my presentation at the Webinale 09 conference:
Virtuelle Güter – reale Gewinne
Virtuelle Güter kennen wir nur aus virtuellen Welten und Online-Spielen. Doch auch in webbasierten Communities entfalten virtuelle Güter ihre Funktion als soziales Statussymbol und bescheren den Community-Betreibern nicht nur erstaunliche Einnahmen, sondern binden gleichzeitig die Nutzer an deren Website. Der Vortrag stellt erfolgreiche Beispiele von virtuellen Gütern in Social Networks vor, erklärt die Grundlagen virtueller Ökonomien und beleuchtet die Erfolgsfaktoren von derartigen Geschäftsmodellen.
The conference takes place in Berlin during May, 25 until 27.
