When I finished the Facebook version of Muddl, it was clear the game wasn’t sufficiently viral to draw big traffic on it’s own, it needed a little boost. Zynga was present at GSP East and talked about their game network that developers could join for free in a link exchange type format. I’d heard about it before and even looked at it for a different application I work on — I signed up to give it a whirl. Since I’m not one to put all of my eggs in one basket I also looked at the game bar from SGN as well — here’s what I found.

Zynga

Zynga has a couple of really popular games in their portfolio and actually has presence on multiple social networking sites. Their value is estimated at $100M. The daily reach is reported to be about 2M over 50M installs. The game bar is simple, it’s a social widget of what games your friends are playing, that cross promotes games in the network. This is the gotcha which I’ll describe in a minute.

The signup is a little frustrating if you don’t have all of your images pre-generated, but they provide a nice Photoshop template to handle all of that. After you sign up - you’re app will be reviewed and then once approved you’ll start experiencing the benefits of the bar which takes only a few seconds to install.

The bar is slightly distracting as it’s very thick, but it seems to do a good job (at least with my network of friends) of telling me who has been doing what and which apps are popular. The one rub I had getting the network is that I’m still not an approved application!!! It’s been over 3 weeks and I’m still in pending status. I emailed multiple times and have posted on the wall and discussion boards. The only response I received anywhere was another developer who said they’re sticking with SGN. Customer service certainly failed here.

SGN

SGN is an up and coming powerhouse platform that just recently acquired most of the remaining independent app developers on Facebook. The company is valued at about $84M. With a daily reach of 800K over 50M users, they’re not as sticky, but certainly a strong force as the number 4 provider over all.

The signup process is very simple as well and the game bar is reasonably easy to install as well, but certainly requires a little more work. Additionally, developers can choose between a thin and thick bar. The thin bar just a mere row of icons where the thick bar is a more robust interactive widget like Zynga’s.

It took just over 2 weeks for the application I submitted to be approved. I was excited to get started. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I needed to download the source code for the network from their developer site. I posted a comment on the wall and in the discussion forum and was happy to receive a response there from another user.

Now armed with that knowledge and the API documentation I was really impressed with the vast offering from SGN. Their API has hooks for top scores, recent activities and such for making a newsfeed like stream. I tried to find some of the tools described in the API for creating templatized newsfeed items but was unable to. I contacted the support email and received a response the same day. It basically said that the API documentation there is very out of date — the hooks are being phased out.

This network is hardly a beta, more of an alpha or an unfinished thought someone had and abandoned. In fact after running the network sparsely over a three day period their developer app still failed to register any views at all. I’ve since removed the game banner entirely.

Summary

If you are a small app starting out - steer clear of the game networks (unless they’re buying you). They have little to offer you in terms of exposure since you have little to offer them. If you manage to scrape up 10 or so users on your own, you’re not going to be providing sufficient value to them to be run in the top spot on either header. You’ll still be forced to grow your application in some other way. Essentially you’re going to be running free advertising on for their network of successful games.

I’m experimenting with Facebook Ads to build an initial audience and have had some good results with it. I’ll share my findings there soon.

I’m not aware of any such network to promote Muddl on Bebo but if you know of one, I’ll post any experiences here. Statistics cited in this post from Adonomics.

Tags: advertising, facebook, muddl, network, promotion, sgn, zynga

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 5:51 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.