FarmVille, you either love it or you hate it, but if you’re one of the 350 million active users on FaceBook it’s unlikely that you haven’t heard of it. With around 73,000,000 monthly players, Farmville is larger than World of Warcraft, attracting over a quarter of FaceBooks population to its pixel pastures on a regular basis, most of whom regularly overshare their farming achievements, such as being a Vegetable Virtuoso or They of Mystery. While being free to play, ploughing a little real cash into the game, of course, makes it easier. Players make in game coins by selling your crops, farming your animals, or harvesting trees and you can use this to buy seeds, more animals, upgrade your farm or buy storage and decorations. Some items are only available for purchase with Farm Cash which you only earn through experience and levelling up, at a very, very slow rate. Fortunately for the impatient you can get more coins and cash just by providing your credit card details, the current exchange rate is 5USD to 25 Farm Cash or 7,500 coins at its most expense, there are discounts for purchasing larger sums.. The question is of course is how many people are prepared to pay real cash to enhance an already pretty fully featured experience, something that I asked about on my own blog back in November 2009, with a post about why we can’t monetise social media.
Today, thanks to a recent announcement by Zynga about the success of its charitable work at the end of 2009 we can hypothesis that the is answer is not very many at all, just over one half per cent it seems.
In October, FarmVille launched the Sweet Seeds for Haiti campaign. Farmers could buy Sweet Potato seeds which when planted would give you three experience points and would never wither. These are both attractive game features, most crops give only two experience points and you need these points to be able to level up, access better crops and grow the size of your farm. Every crop will eventually whither once it has ripened, the amount of time it takes to whither is equal to the amount of time it took to grow and is a key component in making sure that farmers return to the game frequently. The cost of the Sweet Seeds was 25 farm cash and this granted you a one week license to plant as many crops as you pleased, with fifty per cent of the price going to the charity.
This week, Zynga announced on TechCrunch that the eight week long offer had raised over $2 million and it had donated the stated half to the charity. Understandably there was a little bit of a backlash in the comments, the costs involved for Zynga would not have been anywhere near $1 million, even though as one TechCrunch commentator explained:
Sweet Seed electrons are especially costly. They have to be carefully mined at great expense from one particular part of the La Brea tar pits in L.A., and you don’t even want to know what sort of risks Zynga employees took to get them.
Sweet Seeds: Zynga Has Raised Over $1 Million For School Children In Haiti, TechCrunch
While there is a worthwhile debate to be had about the morals of Zynga’s actions and motivations here, the more interesting angle is the sum raised and that Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO, said it had a not much higher click through than the sale of other other Zynga virtual goods. As stated above, FarmVille is one of the most popular activities on the planet. More people than the entire population of the UK regularly spends time playing it. Admittedly the numbers will be skewed as many people start the game and then abandon it quickly, I believe a farm stays active for sixty days without any visits from its owner but for the sake of the argument, as FaceBook does track monthly active users, let us say that there are current 74,000,000 million FarmVille players, which means an average of $0.027 per player was raised over the two month promotion, or $0.00048 cents per day. If every person who did purchase the Sweet Seeds did use farm cash that they had paid for and not earned, and assuming they paid top dollar for the 25 purchase price. Then only 400,000 licences were sold, just over 7,100 a day and to only 0.54 per cent of the farming community, if we assume that no one bought more than one licence. Of course, five dollars each from half a per cent of 74 million is not too shabby, but how many applications have those user figures? Mafia Wars seems to be the other frequent visitor to my Newsfeed and that has over 22 million users. A similar promotion with them would raise around $610,000.
We should not forget that this was for charity and therefore should have enticed more people to put their hands in their pockets so why is that such a very small number did, was it due to the tight financial situation most people found themselves in in 2009, do people not particularly like giving cash to causes they don’t support or are we still used to getting everything online for free and don’t wish to pay for it, even in support of a good cause?
Facebook, TechCrunch