Social gamer willing to use indirect payment methods

San Francisco: While most game developers struggle to monetize even three percent of their users through direct payments for virtual currency, new numbers released by Offerpal Media at the Game Developers Conference show that alternative payment methods enable developers to monetize significantly larger portions of their user base. Derived from a study conducted by comScore, as well as from Offerpal's own network-wide monetization performance, the numbers verify that social gamers are enthusiastic about alternative, or indirect, payment methods as a way to earn virtual currency for free rather than having to pay for it directly.

Do you think Americans are Workaholics?

	Yes
	No

   View result

According to the comScore study, 53.3 percent of the total respondents reported that they would be "very likely" to complete a marketing action such as filling out a survey, watching a video, shopping at online retailers or signing up for a subscription in order to get points for the games they play on leading social networks. By comparison, only 22.8 percent of the respondents reported that they would be willing and are able to buy the points using cash payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers or mobile billing.

The study found that 29.7 percent of social gamers do not have the ability or the means to pay for virtual currency with cash options, and even among those who do have the ability and the means, 34.9 percent say they are "very unlikely" to part with their money in order to purchase points. When asked to indicate how likely they would be to use indirect payment methods to earn points in the games they play, the top preferred marketing actions included, in order, completing a free survey, watching a video, completing tasks such as tagging a photo or proofreading a document, shopping for clothes or other goods online, subscribing to a magazine and subscribing to a movie rental program.

Consumers' preference for alternative means to pay for virtual currency has been borne out in Offerpal's own metrics as well. In recent months, the company has added to its monetization platform a number of alternative payment options, including surveys, shopping rewards, tasks and video, to go along with the offers it has always run. Offerpal reports that since September, 2009-when it launched Offerpal SURVEYS, the first of these incremental alternative payment options-the company has seen a 20 percent increase in the percent of users it is able to monetize.

One example of this growth is seen in recent tests of the company's video campaigns, in which 75 percent of the consumers who viewed a video ad in exchange for virtual currency had never before completed any type of offer nor made a direct payment. What's more, nearly 10 percent of those users went on to complete at least one or more transactions-often incremental cash purchases-in just the first week after watching a video. Similarly, of the users whose first "payment" of virtual currency was by earning it through Offerpal's shopping rewards program, 21 percent went on to make a second transaction through the Offerpal system within one week.

"The data we're seeing shows that there is clearly a strong demand within social gaming for alternative ways to pay for virtual currency," said George Garrick, CEO of Offerpal Media. "When you think of how easy it is to conduct some of these marketing actions like watching a video ad, and the fact that so many people are already doing them online frequently and for no compensation, it makes complete sense that they might as well get rewarded in virtual currency for it. Our goal is to leverage all the most popular alt-pay methods to monetize the maximum number of users at the highest Revenue Per User for our developer partners."

Other findings from the report include:
- Gamers in the 25-34 age range are most likely (70.9 percent "very likely") to be willing to earn virtual currency through marketing actions;