Wow . . . what a year 2009 has been! What started as a very tight-knit group of social game developers, passionate about their craft and often sharing best practices over beers, exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry. Zynga opened the year with 30 million MAUs; it now boasts more than 250 million.

Social Gold both benefited from and contributed to that growth. Currently, we have hundreds of developers using or actively integrating our platform. Additionally, more than 17 million users have conducted transactions through Social Gold. This allowed us to grow our monthly payments volume by more than 2000% in 2009. We started with a single desk in a shared office space in both San Francisco and Seattle — and now we have full-fledged offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore.

The most important growth number for us, however, is 25. That’s the number of superstar employees and contractors who now make up the Social Gold team. We’ve been very fortunate to find incredibly talented people who are not only great at what they do, but who all share the same level of enthusiasm and demonstrate incredible passion for our mission and brand. Invested in each other’s lives, our employees are the “lifeblood” of Social Gold — a dynamic team that makes working hard and playing hard that much more fun.

A key element of celebrating corporate success is recognizing personal milestones, and we certainly did not have a shortage in 2009. While on holiday in Japan, our analytics and subscriptions wunderkind, Mikhail, proposed to his girlfriend. Our fraud guru, Dan, got married and honeymooned in Thailand. And our payments integration specialist, Ryan, welcomed his second child into the world.

Given the global nature of social gaming, it’s not surprising that the team loves international travel. I myself took a ten-day trek through the Himalayas in August. The trip was amazing for many reasons, but it mainly served as a metaphor for the opportunities ahead for Social Gold.

In those ten days, we crossed seven high altitude passes — reaching a maximum height of 16,000 feet. Each day presented a new challenge. After conquering one mountain, we had little time to rest before preparing for the next. Each new climb taxed us both physically and mentally, but the reward of accomplishment was well worth the sacrifice. The joys, though, lay not at the end, but through each step taken along the way.

That’s how I feel about Social Gold. Each day, month, year brings new heights to climb. With new levels of success come new challenges that certainly will require hard work. But we expect a lot of fun as well. 2009 might have been great, but there’s more to do in 2010, and new heights to climb to go before we can even think of rest.

Here’s wishing every one of you the very best in 2010.

When a user decides to accept your offer to subscribe to your application, he or she immediately invests in a commitment to engage with that application on a daily basis. Before making this commitment, many users want assurance that what you provide them is indeed what they’re signing up for. Social Gold Subscriptions provides several ways to instill confidence in the user when they’re making a purchasing decision, lower their barriers to entry and optimize conversion.

• Free trial: “First few days free.” Let users sign up for a subscription, but don’t charge them until they’ve had a chance to try out your application.
• Flexible billing frequency: Offer one subscription plan that bills your users at a frequency that works best for your application, or create several plans with different frequencies and let your users choose.
• Introductory pricing: Attract users with low rates for the first subscription period. (i.e.: “Pay only $5 for the first month; $10 per month thereafter.”)
• Optional expiration: Ask your users for a less intimidating commitment by offering subscriptions that expire after a set number of billing intervals. For some, it’s easier to “subscribe for a year” than to “subscribe forever.”

In addition to user benefits, Social Gold Subscriptions offers an array of advantages for developers. Developers can configure offers via an easy Web form that lets them delineate pricing and messaging. They can also choose the location in the app to display the iframe (a window that displays the Social Gold Subscription form), and what the next steps are after a user subscribes. For full customization, developers receive HTTP postbacks for subscription events and can use them to trigger any feature they choose.

Configuring subscription terms:

Social Gold Subscriptions is a flexible solution that enables a developer to control a plethora of actions by simply logging in with a developer/merchant account on Jambool.com. The platform provides the most efficient way for developers to manage subscription programs, review billing history, control individual subscriptions, and follow up on customer contacts with any relevant issues (such as refunds).

To implement Social Gold Subscriptions, only two API calls are required to launch: one to show the sign up iframe, another to check whether a user is already subscribed. Current subscribers can use the same sign up iframe to check their subscription status, update billing information if it changes, or cancel their subscription.

To get started, sign up for a Social Gold developer/merchant account. Once there, it is easy to set up your subscription parameters (terms, pricing, etc.) through the “Subscription Offer” link (Developer Home > Your Subscription Offers > New), and get a subscription offer ID to use with the API.

For all the details and a full set of instructions, visit the Social Gold Subscriptions documentation.

We work hard to ensure that our Payments and Virtual Currency products provide a secure, in-app payment experience that’s seamless for users and easily integrated by social game developers. Now, with Social Gold Subscriptions, we’re striving to bring that same level of security and usability to paid subscription plans.

Specifically, we hope to help developers who want to grow their business in these three areas:

• Monetize: You want to create a subscription plan and build a stable revenue stream by periodically charging your users for continued access to premium content or services.

• Optimize conversion: You already offer a subscription plan, but want to improve its conversion rate with an in-app signup process, without redirecting users elsewhere.

• Promote loyal customers: You already have loyal users who regularly buy digital goods (or virtual currency) a la carte, and you want to encourage further purchases by offering volume discounts with a smoother payment experience.

Sample Social Gold Subscriptions IFRAME:

Your users experience Social Gold Subscriptions as an iframe embedded in your website. New subscribers enter their billing information into this iframe and submit it securely to Social Gold. We process the first payment, activate the subscription, and notify your application – all in real time, all while the user stays on your site. The iframe closes and you have a new paid subscriber. We’ll charge them regularly until you tell us to stop, or they decide to cancel.

Over the lifetime of your subscription program, our goal is to save you hundreds of hours and headaches by taking care of time- and data-intensive tasks like billing, accounting, and payment support. You’ll have all the information you need to make the right decisions to benefit your service, and we’ll provide valuable metrics such as the number of active subscribers, cancellations, total monthly payments and fees paid. We’ll also provide subscriber management tools, including refunds and the history of subscription-related events for a given user.

If that sounds like it might be beneficial to one of your upcoming projects, take a look at our Subscriptions Guide (signup required) and stay tuned as we’ll have more details and examples for you in the coming weeks.

At Social Gold, we’re dedicated to continually bringing new and innovative payment methods to the arena of flash-based social games. Which is why we were so delighted this week to announce our partnership with Zong.

Until now, making a purchase within a flash game – usually virtual currency – was a process limited to those who held credit cards. Because the primary purpose of Social Gold is to make in-game transactions as quick, seamless and secure as possible, Zong seemed like a natural partner as a company that’s revolutionized social gaming payments by allowing users to fund their accounts with nothing more than a cell phone number.

What this means for us is that the developers who use Social Gold secure in-flash payments to process their transactions – more than 100 are either live or are actively integrating our API since it was announced a few weeks ago – have access to an even larger paying user base. In the earlier release, we made it possible for users to pay using credit cards, securely within flash games. Now, even people who have not yet secured a line of credit can sign up and improve their gaming experience. It’s an exciting development that delivers almost every paying demographic to flash-based games.

Cell phone users of Social Gold get the same frictionless, in-app experience they’ve come to expect with our previous functionality in games like Barn Buddy and Uno, never having to leave the action in order to load or reload their accounts.

We’re proud of our continued commitment to both users and developers. For users, we’ve provided yet another facet in helping to make their gaming experience as complete and unobtrusive as possible, going so far as to accept PayPal and Amazon accounts through our interface.

For developers, we’ve opened a channel to reach an entire segment of previously unavailable customers. Developers of all sizes – from small houses to some of the industry’s biggest names, like the Broth, Crowdstar and RealNetworks – have integrated Social Gold’s API, with more signing on every day.

The process is as easy as registering your cell phone number. Users’ providers supply the necessary credit, then bill them on their regular billing cycle. The process is the same as it is for credit card customers; users never have to leave the game interface to stock their virtual bank accounts.

This is just the latest step in our ongoing dedication to helping developers provide cutting-edge security and payment options to their customers. Keep your eyes open – there’s more on the way.

   
Playfish’s recent acquisition by Electronic Arts is great news for the company itself (it was purchased for up to $400 million in cash, stock and earnouts), but also for the social gaming industry as a whole. Playfish is the most respected social games company — every developer we talked to brings up their user experience as the benchmark. With this acquisition, one can imagine a whole new set of possibilities for both companies.

It “validates the social gaming business model overall,” said Playfish COO Sebastien de Halleux in a PaidContent interview.

What’s important to remember here is why Playfish — a company just two years old — was worth so much to EA. Playfish set the bar high with games like Pet Society, Restaurant City, Country Story and Who Has the Biggest Brain?.

These titles are noteworthy because of their quality. Their popularity alone can attest to that; instead of the standard array of promotional techniques used by many social gaming companies, Playfish relies primarily on word of mouth. Its games are successful because the company pays attention to the qualitative feedback (both solicited and otherwise) it receives from players. It tracks gamers’ tendencies to see what works and what doesn’t.

Most of all, it cares more about delivering an authentic user experience than it does the bottom line, and people flock to that mentality. (Look no farther any of the large number of companies that fail to make such a clear distinction; chances are, they’re not nearly as successful.)

The reason for this is simple: When it comes to social games, people are buying an experience. Whenever they spend real money on virtual goods for games, it’s to enhance their experience with those games. Playfish prioritizes that experience, and it shows.

Eric Ries hit it on the head when he wrote on his blog that everyone — not just social gamers — buys virtual goods. His real-world examples include $200 designer jeans that sell for four times the amount of a comparable pair without the label. It’s the experience of buying and wearing the jeans — the feeling one gets from the process of owning them — behind the bulk of the purchase price.

Successful companies are able to promote that feeling, especially when it comes to social gaming. As Playfish just proved, giving users an authentic, differentiated experience that they feel good about isn’t just integral to the bottom line — it is the bottom line.

Congratulations to the Playfish team for their success!

Once upon a time, this country ran on an agrarian economy – people grew, raised and mined things, then sold them. That gave way to an industrial economy, in which manufactured goods dominated. Over the last half-century we’ve had a service-based economy, hinging on the personalization of products.

Now, though, we’ve shifted again – or so says Joseph Pine in his book, “The Experience Economy.”

As the title suggests, Pine says that what people want now is experiences – moments that surround them and make them feel good. It’s why people go to Disneyland or Las Vegas for staged experiences, or online for experiences of a different type. People are essentially buying time, plus the feeling that a place or a company can give them during that time.

Take coffee, said Pine during his talk at the TED conference in Los Angeles in early 2009. Beans can be purchased for pennies; slightly more if someone goes through the effort of roasting them for you. Places like the corner diner that brew it can raise the price to a dollar or so per cup.

So how can a place like Starbucks get away with $4 lattes?

It’s because they’re giving you an experience every time you walk in the door. You get the decor and the clientele — whatever it is that makes it a uniquely Starbucks experience.

This is the driving force behind social gaming. Outsiders express disbelief when they hear about people spending real money for virtual goods and services (a gun in Mafia Wars, a tractor in Barn Buddy), but they don’t realize is that it’s not the goods themselves that people covet, it’s the experience that those goods will help them have online. The goods – and the virtual currency with which they buy them – merely enable that experience, that entertainment.

These same outsiders call these games escapism, and maybe they are – but they’re still authentic experiences. Gamers sign up for specific reasons; either their conditions are met or they move on to a different game.

And authenticity, Pine told the TED audience, “is becoming the new consumer sensibility – the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who they are going to buy from, and what they’re going to buy.”

It only makes sense: The more authentic the experience – in the case of social gaming, the more immersion a game can provide – the more likely that people with stick with it, and subsequently spend money there. This experience is foremost the core element to building your virtual economy.

Social Gold helps you convey an authentic social-gaming experience, by keeping players within your game’s parameters to complete transactions (such as purchasing virtual currency for that online gun or tractor) instead of sending them into a new window, which brings them entirely out of the experience they’re seeking, then forcing them to re-load their game upon returning.

It’s a mechanism for users to plug in real money, bringing in revenue for you. And when it comes to real money, you must ensure that you make the user’s transactional experience as smooth and quick as possible. This is where Social Gold can help – enabling you to bring money in, securely, safely and with ease, all within the game experience.

After all, whether it’s developers or gamers, we’re in this business to help people get the kind of experience they’re looking for.

Hot off the press, here is the presentation I gave at the Virtual Goods Summit today.

Have you signed up for Social Gold in-game payments yet? Now you can let your users pay within your flash game — keeping them engaged!

John is playing Barn Buddy on Facebook, but doesn’t have enough currency to buy the guard dog he so desperately wants. To purchase more virtual coins he has to leave the Flash application for an HTML form or Javascript pop-up, and, while away from the game, gets distracted and doesn’t return.

Jenny is playing Uno when she runs out of coins to buy kudos, gifts and gags for her online friends. In order to refresh her account she also has to refresh the game, losing her hand.

So far, these have been unavoidable consequences of doing real business in the middle of Flash-based games; it’s not uncommon to see up to 15 percent abandonment with each additional page in the transaction flow. This translates into less engagement and fewer payments.

Social Gold is changing that with the launch of the first ever secure in-flash payments solution.

For the first time, users of Flash-based games can now update their accounts without leaving the game for a separate payments page; finishing a purchase drops them exactly where they left off, with no reloading necessary.

Even more pertinent is the fact that in the exploding landscape of social-gaming development, Social Gold for Flash allows players to keep their financial information with a single, trustworthy source, rather than handing it over repeatedly, every time they want to try a new platform. Our patent-pending technology ensures that sensitive data is kept securely away from other in-flash code, so that neither the game itself nor any third-party code or servers has access to the keystrokes or data in any form fields. Even the developers’ credentials are protected against malicious use.

Here’s how it works: After setting up a virtual currency account at Jambool, you can download and link-in a small library (SWC) into your application. To register a transaction, you tell the library to open a “buy currency” interface within the game’s Flash application. Social Gold for Flash then securely collects and verifies the user’s credit card credentials and authorizes the transaction, keeping every detail except for the ultimate approval out of your hands, and you can then update the player’s in-game balance. The entire time in this flow, the user stays engaged within your flash game.

“We obsess over user engagement, and traditional monetization solutions kill engagement,“ said Markus Weichselbaum, CEO of TheBroth and creator of Barn Buddy, which boasts 7 million monthly active users. “Social Gold for Flash works great for us, keeping our users engaged while helping to drive increased revenue.”

Social Gold was the first product to provide in-game payment experience for non-flash applications, and with this release we’ve made it possible for users to do secure in-game transactions in flash games too.

Increase your conversion by providing your users with a truly seamless payments experience! The integration is easy; sign up here.

Social Gold will be at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco this week. Those who attended last year — or those who attended last June’s Social Gaming Summit by the same organizers — know that this is one of the more exciting conferences catering to the virtual goods community.

If you haven’t registered yet, you should — and you can use the “SOCIALGOLD” discount code to get 15% off registration.

Come hear us talk about “How to launch your virtual currency” on the first day of the conference, also known as the Virtual Goods Summit University. Drop by and say hello — and we may even have a surprise gift for you.

We are excited to announce a new, self-serve feature that allows developers to create a customized look and feel for their in-game payments experience. Think of it as a way of creating customized skins on the fly that match and blend with the colors of your game. This, in turn, helps to extend your brand and to increase user engagement and conversion rate.

So, how does it work? Simple. All you do is share the hex code of your game’s primary highlight color, and we do the rest. We generate a color palette and gradient that matches and blends with your game’s look and feel, and you are ready to go.

Here is how you instantly customize the payments flow for your in-game payment.

Log into your Social Gold account to configure your in-game payments offer.

Edit your Account Settings

Choose the integration (offer) you want to edit (or create a new one). Next, go down to the advanced settings. Go to the customize highlight section and add the hex code of your game and hit enter. Hint: You can always change the hex color if you are not satisfied with your original choice.

Edit your integration settings

Set up the Primary Highlight Color

Save, and voilà! You have a a new, customized skin that matches and blends with the look and feel of your online game.

Colors to match your game

The new, customized in-game payment window appears in the context of your website/online game and blends in with the flow of the game. As much as we love our color schemes, they can sometimes appear jarring to the user playing your game, especially as they are about to open their wallets and send you money.

Why would you want to customize the in-game payments experience? There are three simple reasons. First, you can now control the look and feel of your website. Second, you can improve your conversion rate. Our initial tests have shown an improvement of around 10% across several applications. Third and most importantly, by deploying a natural, blended looking in-game payments experience, you provide your users with a natural way to pay without interrupting the flow of their game. The payment window appears in the context of the game and blends in with the flow of the game. This ensures that the user stays engaged in the game.

So, go ahead and give it a spin. Take control of your game and effectively increase user engagement, increase conversion rate, increase your revenue, and most importantly extend your brand. Skin your Social Gold in-game payments flow now!

Don’t forget to let us know what you think and ping us. We want to hear from you.