Mark Pincus Blog

Ensuring zynga's user experience - removing all cpa offers

michael arrington posted yesterday on mobile offerings still being shown in our new game fishville.  I want to explain why this occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this never happens again.

zynga has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with. 

with regards to yesterday's incident, the offer provider, doubleding, told us this was the result of their failure to remove an optimization queue which was still showing these ads to 10% of pageviews. i want to be clear that zynga had no control over the pages being shown and never filtered them from michael or anyone's view.

we recognize it is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user experience are not shown with any of our games.

therefore, we are removing all CPA offers across zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.  This will be effective by end of day today.  this move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and myspace.  

yesterday’s mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund doubleding earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on user experience.  we intend to influence them and others to improve their ad content and be long-term focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking industries.

as I said in my post last monday, my mission is to build zynga into a sustainable consumer service with enduring value to our users.  we will continue to do whatever it takes to earn our users trust and respect for the long-term.

to zwink or not?

michael arrington posted a clip today of a bar-side chat I did with Berkeley entrepreneurs in which I stressed how we were laser focused from the beginning on finding revenue opportunities that would scale. The primary reason I pointed to is that entrepreneurs should push to control their own destinies, and being profitable was the best path.

In the video I refer to how early on we experimented with offering zwinky toolbars.  Unfortunately, we offered these before trying them out for ourselves. Once we did, we found them to be a painful experience and i'm proud that even then as a 10 person startup we decided to take them down.

the lesson we learned was that while we needed to strive for early profitability, we also couldn't sacrifice user experience.

Btw, these zwinky toolbars from an IAC subsidiary are still widely offered on the web today.

 

My take on zynga and cpa offers

Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry. 

It has been my mission at zynga to create a sustainable consumer service with long term value to our users and partners.  Social gaming is emerging quickly and requiring new rules of engagement from host networks to user payments and advertising forms.

So why does zynga offer these ads?  

Most of these offers are good for the advertiser and user. There are many users who don’t have access to online payment methods who are still interested in making in game purchases. There is also great potential for large web players like amzn, ebay and netflix to leverage social media channels like facebook and zynga to acquire new user relationships. Sponsoring a white tiger or pink tractor may accelerate these customer acquisition campaigns.

The offer industry is still just getting started and this category of advertising makes up a small minority of our revenue, the bulk of which comes from users directly purchasing virtual goods.  

We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value.

At zynga, we have faced a similar challenge in providing customer support to millions of users of our free games. Six months ago we were overwhelmed with our ticket volumes and faced an F rating with the better business bureau. We made massive efforts to address this, getting our maximum response times for live email and phone support down to 72 hours and raised our rating to a B+. Even today we realize our customer support isn’t at the level our users expect and we continue to work on it.

Similarly, we are working to improve the quality of the CPA offers exposed to our users and evolving our policies and practices to ensure that zynga is worthy of our users’ trust.

There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun. It's particularly exciting to see how social games can empower people to change their world.  In a small way, we have seen this with our sweet seeds for Haiti campaign where Farmville players raised $500k to provide lunches for 500 kids for the next year. We expect to do more.

As we evolve to a world where people connections are the basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these. 

Zynga games about to come back up

dear zynga gamers, 

we are sorry that our games were down for the last 2 hrs. our netops crew is working hard to bring our games back up. mafia wars is up now on fb and rest coming in next few minutes.

we're really sorry your evening fun was interrupted. 

mark 

Earmarks

Todays usa today reports that despite obama's pledge to reduce earmarks to below $7.8b (where they were before bush), they will still hit $19b.

They include F22 jets the pentagon doesn't want!

$2m for a bike path in spokane.

$600k for the wild turkey federation, a turkey hunting group.

Apparently, obama may now not want to stand up to fellow law makers as he needs their support to pass his healthcare bill.

Guess the dream of a president who will veto earmarked spending bills is still one for movies. Where's dave?

you know you're a little cool when...

kevin rose of diggnation covers your game! well, he actually said he lost geek cred by even mentioning, but check out minute 35ish and on where he covers farmville...

finally! getting to a common term sheet on series A funding

this has become a big topic in the past week with fred's post and now a techcrunch story. also, thx to adeo ressi for all his great work with the funded and the entrepreneur foundation to help spur more amazing startups. 

this is a comment i posted in response to fred wilson's great post about converging on a common term sheet for first round venture financing of startups. 

i will add a few points.

1. pre money valuation should value the company as it exists today. if investors want to ask for an option pool that is reducing the value of the company as it exists today and is therefore a lower pre money. i've always thought this was a bs way for vc's to sell you an emotional value but make you take a third less.

2. if a company is profitable the entrepreneur should NEVER give up control. if it's not, the vc's can negotiate for that. control is hire/fire the ceo and set budgets. 

3. msg to vc's. if you like an industry, company, team back them. if you dont dont. entrepreneurs - dont work with vc's that demand anything beyond normal preferred with 1x liquidation. if they ask for 8% dividends and a 5 yr forced payback, tell them to go be bankers and lend their money out. 

4. control - entrepreneurs, assume that if a vc can fire you they will. it can happen bc you performed badly and also bc you performed too well, and you have never managed such a big business. 

5. relationships - matter a lot. go with people you know and trust, not the highest bidder. go 10% below your market price, choose your investor and hopefully they will feel priviledged. my advice is pick people you would like to have beer and sushi with like fred. 

6. ref check - ask to interview founders of failed companies the vc backed, especially ones who have been replaced. remember, some should be replaced.

Game downtime

Fyi, facebook is experiencing network outages which have taken all our games down intermittently all morning. Sorry to anyone missing their morning fix.

US govt deal making is a race to the bottom

Its been painful to watch our democrat led govt turn into a free money feeding frenzy.

Todays nytimes reports that in order to pass the climate change bill lawmakers doled out billions in gifts to each other and special interests from agriculture, forestry and even oil.

It says "the deal making continued up untill the final moments with rep waxman doling out billions on the house floor to secure final votes.'

The story notes that a freshman lawmaker from florida got $50 million for a hurricane research center.

Rep bobby rush of illinois withheld support until a last minute deal got his state $1 billion for jobs and energy efficient public housing. Does anyone question whether the energy saved will equal the $1 billion we're providing?

Even texas oil refineries got 'relief' with nearly $3 billion annually to help with added costs.

Rahm emanuel's quote says the president 'loves the bill...including the great, the good and the not so great provisions.'

As I've said before, we are reliving the lyndon johnson years of guns and butter. The only difference is the magnitude of spending.

What happens when you have a country with less than half its voters paying any taxes and a small % paying the majority?

For the minority footing greater bills there is a disincentive to generate income. For the vast majority there is a race to the bottom. Get while the getting's good.

In other nytimes news...the governor of south carolina says he will repay public funds used to visit his mistress in argentina which he rationalizes because 'it was a real love story'. And Al franken wins the supreme court decision giving the dems a filibuster proof senate majority.

God help us all:)

Zynga customer support - catching up

I'm happy to report that zynga is now handling all cs tix within 72 hrs. Our team has worked hard to keep up with the growth in our game userbase. Zynga now has nearly 200 cs reps across 3 continents responding to our customers.

If you have an outstanding issue that remains unresolved pls resubmit to our cs.

Who's managing our money?

The govt running gm is like wolves tending the sheep herd. Great npr piece on all the ways congressmen are interfering with gm mgt's efforts to reduce costs.

Zynga players

Zynga has recently banned many players across its games for bad actions like chip hacking and selling.

If you believe you have been unfairly banned pls email chris hinton, chrish@zynga.com with a link to your profile. Zynga will verify your account and reinstate if deserved.

Dealing with with game hackers

Zynga has taken some massive actions this week to protect our users from in game hackers.

if you feel you have been wrongly banned from our games go to our customer support and they will verify your account status.

We have massively scaled our customer support to well over 100 full time reps to help deal with this.

You can also post to this blog and I will do my best to respond.

I'm sorry for any trouble anyone has had. We strive to offer a fun, safe environment for you to play with your friends and (nice) other people:)

Web 3 - the whole world will be a game

All web services will eventually look and feel like games. Users will gravitate to the 'funnest' ecommerce or other sites. Game mex will be the most valuable skillset for web content and commerce.

Iphone app to help me interview

Why isn't there an app that tells me question types for various positions and then let's me benchmark answers in relative and absolute terms?

It could propose simple to hard verbal math problems for engineers and biz people to test problem solving. It could let me time responses.

Web 3.0 snippets - I

We have entered the third business plan of the web.

Web 1.0 was about aggregating online audiences. The currency was eye balls measured in page views. This business was banner ads and ecommerce.

Web 2.0 was the search economy which enabled many more businesses to participate through sem and seo. The currency was clicks and while it was higher margin, most of that went to the search companies, primarily goog.

Web 3.0 is about monetizing this massive web audience through users paying for mostly digital goods and services. The product will be a service or at least ongoing relationship. Distribution could be through Apps or even daily emails. The currency will be DAUs (daily active users). This will be higher margin and fuel an exponentially greater number of companies.

Web 3.0 businesses may range from games and virtual goods (like zynga) to private sales like my wife's www.onekingslane.com/join . It will spawn many new online industries with creative entrepreneurs constantly testing what digital goods and services users will be willing to pay for.

Web 3.0 businesses will be measured in $$/pixel/minute. This is a throw back to hsn and qvc. These home shopping services proliferated because they could better monetize local cable screen time which couldn't be sold as it wasn't measurable.

Web 3.0 services will be ttly metric driven. The best will combine intuition and data to rapidly iterate and drive reach, retention and revenue.

Major distribution platforms from social nets like fb and myspace to portals like yhoo and goog should all be massive beneficiaries. Key will be their ability to attract entrepreneurs and enable them to effectively test their services.

If TCI has been able to do this with its channel space all of cable would be far more valuable and relevant today.

Msg to big media -- open api your assets. Invite the world to harvest your land.

Fw: My Supreme Court nominee

Obama is using brilliant web marketing post campaign to keep taking his msg direct to the people. Feels like the days of web based democracy are getting closer by the email.

Love this. Go obama!

________________________________ From: President Barack Obama To: Mark Pincus Sent: Tue May 26 14:11:17 2009 Subject: My Supreme Court nominee

Mark --

I am proud to announce my nominee for the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

This decision affects us all -- and so it must involve us all. I've recorded a special message to personally introduce Judge Sotomayor and explain why I'm so confident she will make an excellent Justice.

Please watch the video, and then pass this note on to friends and family to include them in this historic moment.

[http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/sotomayor_email_video_graphic2.jpg]

Judge Sotomayor has lived the America Dream. Born and raised in a South Bronx housing project, she distinguished herself in academia and then as a hard-charging New York District Attorney.

Judge Sotomayor has gone on to earn bipartisan acclaim as one of America's finest legal minds. As a Supreme Court Justice, she would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any Justice in 100 years. Judge Sotomayor would show fidelity to our Constitution and draw on a common-sense understanding of how the law affects our day-to-day lives.

A nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land is one of the most important decisions a President can make. And the discussions that follow will be among the most important we have as a nation. You can begin the conversation today by watching this special message and then passing it on:

http://my.barackobama.com/SupremeCourt

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

Paid for and authorized by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Democratic National Committee, 430 S. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC 20003

Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

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One happy user!

Compute: Back up ... Zynga update ... data recovery ... more

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 05/12/2009 - 16:46.

• By JAMES DERK, Scripps Howard News Service
• Science and Tech

Q. What happened with Zynga? Don't leave us hanging!

A. Regular readers will note that I recently gently urged Zynga, a game manufacturer on such platforms as Facebook and MySpace, to improve their customer support and technical support. I received a sincere apology from Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, and shared a conference call with its management team, offering some suggestions on how I'd improve things. I enjoyed talking with the team and really believe they are trying to improve things. I will keep in touch with them and pass along your comments in aggregate to them.

They also promised some cool improvements to "Mafia Wars" (and gave me back my "Defense!")