Premium cable network Starz is backing the second-season premiere of political drama “Boss” with video stunt Price for Power.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Source: AllFacebook
VIDEO
Cross-promotion pioneer Applifier is upgrading from display bars to a video ad network called Impact, debuting on Facebook this month with King.com, Gaia Online and Song Pop games.
Impact allows developers to display 30- to 60-second game trailers from within a Facebook game at key points of the user experience. The idea is that the videos increase monetization or acquisition, depending on how they are implemented. A user may be prompted to watch a video in exchange for a virtual good for that game after failing a level, for example; this would increase monetization as the user is more engaged (and therefore more likely to spend) and any advertising seen in the video will yield pay-per-view revenue for the developer. On the acquisition side, a user may see a persistent module in a game’s UI that shows a video trailer of a second game, which could drive cross-promotion.
Whatever method a developer chooses, Applifier’s policy mandates that Impact video ads are opt-in only — no forcing them on users unasked. The video ads can be targeted at either the most engaged users (the ones more likely to monetize), or at users who could be losing interest and are therefore in the mood to try a new game (more likely to become a new acquisition). The targeting is based on player behavior collected from over 250 million anonymous player profiles. Developers can choose to reinvest earnings from displaying the video ads to receive a 25 percent boost in user acquisition.
Impact might seem like a stretch for the noble-spirited cross-promotion network of 2010 that wanted to share traffic between small- and mid-sized developers. Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen explains, however, that game trailers are very much an extension of his company’s core values.
“We still believe in Facebook gaming,” he tells Inside Social Games. “It’s not exploding anymore, but there’s still business there. We believe Facebook games deserve more [recognition] for the quality. Trailers can provide that — banners are just not enough.”
Around this time last year, Applifier had just entered the mobile market with a game discovery and cross-promotion app similar to what it offered on Facebook. The company has been very quiet since then; Laakkonen says that we can expect to hear more about Applifier’s efforts in the coming months. Next up on the company’s to-do is a panel on user acquisition panels during the IDGA Summit at Casual Connect in Seattle next week.
Source: Inside Social Games
The next level of news engagement has arrived. Whereas Twitter and Facebook changed the media by shortening news into digestible chunks for anyone to share, one new company wants to create deeper, more immersive type of content experience that will surround us with the story: Condition One.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media
Imagine there's no Facebook and no Twitter. You want to extend your brand identify via social media and move along the road to selling. These guys offer options.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media
A digital photo app, DoAlbums, topped our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week.
We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew by between 100,000 and 490,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.
Top Gainers This Week
| Name | MAU | Gain | Gain,% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | 720,000 | +490,000 | + 213% | |
| 2. | 660,000 | +450,000 | + 214% | |
| 3. | 730,000 | +360,000 | + 97% | |
| 4. | 460,000 | +290,000 | + 171% | |
| 5. | 740,000 | +200,000 | + 37% | |
| 6. | 350,000 | +180,000 | + 106% | |
| 7. | 420,000 | +180,000 | + 75% | |
| 8. | 260,000 | +180,000 | + 225% | |
| 9. | 410,000 | +160,000 | + 64% | |
| 10. | 590,000 | +150,000 | + 34% | |
| 11. | 710,000 | +150,000 | + 27% | |
| 12. | 320,000 | +150,000 | + 88% | |
| 13. | 830,000 | +150,000 | + 22% | |
| 14. | 910,000 | +140,000 | + 18% | |
| 15. | 330,000 | +140,000 | + 74% | |
| 16. | 310,000 | +140,000 | + 82% | |
| 17. | 570,000 | +120,000 | + 27% | |
| 18. | 300,000 | +120,000 | + 67% | |
| 19. | 650,000 | +110,000 | + 20% | |
| 20. | 430,000 | +100,000 | + 30% |
DoAlbums helps users create photo albums on Facebook by uploading photos from their computers or Instagram accounts. Video apps were popular as well. There was Polish video site Vidd, group video chat app ooVoo and mobile video effects app GifBoom.
House M.D.: Critical Cases led the games, and quiz apps continue to be popular. Cute Smileys grew by postings a photo to the stream of a user’s name designed with smiley faces. Crush Meter tells a user which of their friends has a “crush” on them.
Finally, online community Waze – Drive Social, page app The Fan Machine and Chinese music platform KKBOX (not available in the U.S.) rounded out our list.
All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.
Source: Inside Facebook
Facebook has updated its Open Graph publishing guidelines to require social news and video apps to wait at least 10 seconds before posting “read” or “watch” actions to a user’s Timeline. This will prevent Open Graph applications from being able to publish stories on behalf of users immediately after they click a link.
Facebook seems to be starting to enforce some best practices for social readers and video apps, which have grown extremely quickly but have poor public perception. Many users complain that these applications publish stories that they didn’t mean to share. Although 10 seconds is the minimum amount of time that a user must be on a piece of content before their activity is shared, some developers might want to use an even longer span to ensure that published actions reflect a user’s actual behavior. If a video is 5 minutes long and a user leaves after 20 seconds, for example, the user might resent the app telling their friends that they watched the video.
In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook told developers they should allow users to easily turn sharing on or off, and that the setting should persist. However, it’s unclear if a particular setting should be applied every time a user visits an app or be reset when a user leaves and returns. Spotify, for instance, offers a “private session” mode, but if users close the application and reopen it, their listening activity will reset to sharing.
Users can always change their app settings and delete stories from their activity log, but Facebook is encouraging developers to give users more control from within an app. Open Graph documentation says social reading apps should provide users with an option to remove any “read” stories directly from an article page. For video applications, Facebook says developers must provide the option to remove the activity from the same page the content appears. Video apps must also give the user clear, ongoing, and in-context messaging that their watch actions will be published on Facebook.
Also in Wednesday’s developer update, the social network announced that applications must use the built-in “read” and “watch” actions moving forward. Previously these actions were in beta for certain Open Graph partners. Now no custom “read” or “watch” actions will be accepted, and developers have 90 days to convert their custom actions to the built-in verbs. This will allow all social reader and video activity to be aggregated properly on users’ Timelines and in News Feed. For example, Facebook displays “trending articles” and “trending videos” based on these built-in actions.
Source: Inside Facebook
