Here are some quick hits on things I found of interest last week:
Café World’s Progress Bar
One of the more innovative campaigns of the week was a progression bar at the top of Café World, helping walk a user through all the ways to sign up for various communication channels:
The nice part here was the fairly clear user benefit spelled out for each item along the way:
- Install the game
- Add the bookmark – “Find your way back”
- Become a Fan of the Game – “Get exclusive offers”
- Sign up for emails from us – “Know when your food is ready”
- Allow us to publish directly to your news feed – “Post content faster”
The progress bar was only up for a couple of days so not sure if it either was unsuccessful or ran afoul of Facebook standards. Similarly, one of the scrollable alerts in Mafia Wars presented a similar checklist of things to complete, sans the benefit explanation:
Playfish’s Gangster City Not Retaining Users
Playfish’s latest release, Gangster City, is facing a real uphill battle in retaining users. While Playfish has been promoting the game with ads and seeing consistent growth in bringing in new users (see the MAU trend below from appdata.com), growth in daily users has been pretty flat, pushing the sticky factor down to the teens within the first two weeks.
Granted there have been a great deal of application issues on the platform over the last week, but we’re not seeing the same dips across the board.
One potential culprit could be Zynga advertising. This ad (to the right) touting the new Bangkok expansion for Zynga’s Mafia Wars features art work that looks a great deal like that of the more animated Gangster City than the more realistic approach Mafia Wars has been using to date. Regardless, it doesn’t look like Gangster City is going to help Playfish bust out of their across-the-board decline since the November 4th acquisition by Electronic Arts.
Jumping the Gun on 6 Million
Zynga sent this notification to Texas Hold’em players on Friday night:
Only problem is, they had only hit 5,816,752 DAU (an all-time high) on Facebook on 2/6 according to App data. If Zynga’s internal count shows they did indeed exceed 6 million, then the other 200,000 or so might be coming from the iphone App or MySpace users (which puts the contribution from those channels in perspective).
[Note: I’m tracking milestones on a separate tab on this blog (see here) and welcome any input or corrections.]
