Farmville vs. LinkedIn
I’m a little slow out of the gates on this one… I’ve been ignoring all the requests to become a @#$%ing Vampire, Pirate, Werewolf etc, and simply ignored gaming on Facebook, in particular the growth of the Farm sims like Farmville.
Turns out quite a bit was going on that I hadn’t noticed….
I found out yesterday that Farmville has 63.7 million active users.
And it was launched in June 2009.
To put that into context, I’d like to make an apples-to-oranges comparison:
LinkedIn has been around since early 2003.
It has taken them 6 years to grow to 50 million users.
In less than 6 months Farmville has overtaken LinkedIn in terms of user numbers.
I would not be surprised to discover that Farmville’s average revenue per user is also better than the figure LinkedIn is able to extract.
It’s easy to argue that Farmville is an app while LinkedIn is a platform, or that LinkedIn has enduring usefullness while Farmville is a fad that is likely to grow stale, but the sheer velocity of the growth is the part that I find interesting.
It says a couple of things to me:
- The mechanics of building social networks are now well understood. Zynga and others are clearly mastering the ability to tap into networks and grow extremely quickly.
- Facebook is the social platform that you ignore at your peril. They have successful transformed from an online social application and network into an application platform that can be used to build vast audiences for 3rd-party applications.
- Facecbook weilds a lot of power in this ecosystem – they are not a dumb platform. It’s likely that the current model will not endure, and that Zynga and others will be forced to use a Facebook-sanctioned payment mechanism for in-game purchases that gives Facebook a piece of the revenues.
- App platforms and app developers are vulnerable in this ecosystem. While ‘Net Neutrality‘ debates are raging on the open internet, large pockets of the net are now controlled by single companies. This aspect deserves more attention from the Net Neutrality camp if they really care about more than their uncapped and unshaped connections used to download pirated media.
Do you play Farmville? Have you played and then stopped? What does the closed Facebook platform mean for you, if anything?
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I played Farmville for around 2 weeks, and was impressed by the simple, yet highly effective sticky elements… the daily “cash prizes”, the gifts you could send friends, the ease with which you could visit friends’ farms, the varied growth of crops so that you can play all day or twice a week, and everything in between.
I have also played Fishville, the fast growing sister product… a straight rip, and equally addictive.
The Facebook platform seemed not an issue, until I realised that because I am no longer a very active Facebook user, I had missed the fact that Farmville requests were lying stagnant in my notifications folder… and the game itself had not drawn my attention to them, i.e.: I had to become more active on Facebook itself to play the game effectively.
Interestingly, this fad has drawn my pre-teen son and many of his friends from Puzzle Pirates and miniclip to Facebook, where they do not network in the more traditional sense, but only communicate via Zynga games – as message posts literally on each other’s farms.
Much more concerning however, is how much time our CFO spends playing Farmville. Whose managing the money?