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Commentary » PYMNTS Voice
Facebook Faces Payment Feud Down on the Farm(ville)
There’s a feud taking place on Facebook. And, it’s about money. And, like most feuds over money, it’s about who pays whom and how much. And, just like the Hatfields and McCoys, the party that fired the first shot may have aimed at the wrong target and for all the wrong reasons.
You may have read over the last week about two decisions that Facebook made recently and that were directed to Zynga, which developed the popular Farmville game. These decisions were to (1) limit the number of notifications that can be disseminated about Farmville activities via the status updates, and (2) to force Farmville farmers to use Facebook’s payment method to buy stuff for their virtual farms.
The first is controversial given Zynga’s stature as one of Facebook’s biggest advertisers, spending tens of millions last year to drive more farmers to Farmville. As a non-Farmville fan, I secretly applauded this move by Facebook since I was getting pretty tired of having my news feed constantly co-opted by friends’ Farmville updates (I don’t play and never have tried.) But, setting aside my personal bias, Facebook has grown its business because it has been able to attract developers who want to leverage its awesome social graph. It touts, as a selling point, its power to drive messages virally and with great velocity. The notion now that developers have embraced the platform, only now to have Facebook limit how viral applications can become in order to drive their advertising revenues higher seems pretty short-sighted.
It’s the second decision related to payments that I think is the most interesting and potentially the most problematic, but not for Zynga. Facebook wants Farmville farmers to use Facebook Credits exclusively since it wants to charge Zynga a 30% fee for the revenue that flows through Credits. I get that Facebook wants to drive adoption and usage of their payment product. And, when drawn on a whiteboard and subsequently put in a powerpoint deck, the notion of picking one of the most popular applications on their platform as a strategy to make that happen probably seemed logical. But, as many a failed payments company will attest, adoption and usage of new payments products doesn’t happen because someone decides to force it, and especially when the one doing the forcing has picked the wrong side of the platform to strong-arm.
Let’s look at the Facebook payments ecosystem for a minute as it relates to Zynga. There are Farmville fans, who play the game on Facebook and who want to keep their farms pretty and buy stuff to do that. We have Zynga that has created Farmville, and has brought to Facebook a huge base of people now who play the game on Facebook and because they are on Facebook, are available for Facebook to monetize in many other ways, like selling advertising to merchants who want to reach these people and enticing Farmville farmers and their friends to buy other things that are for sale on the site. In fact, Zynga’s games brought with it more than 80 million monthly active users. This was, until recently, a happy little ecosystem. Everybody got something of value.
Now, Farmville farm owners have to establish a Facebook Credits account if they don’t want their artichokes to wither and die. That means that they have to move away from whatever they are doing now and do something they have never done before – create a new account. Some people will probably be okay with doing that but some people might chose not to, for a lot of reasons, including privacy and security. That means that Zynga will lose customers at the same time they are being told to pay up on the advertising side and to pay up on the payments side. In platform speak, this has the potential to become a death spiral, where customers leave, and then their friends who used to plow their fields leave, and then more people leave, and soon, everybody loses, including Facebook.
As I said, I get that Facebook wants to monetize payments on their platform. Who doesn’t? But I don’t understand this strategy. These two decisions have managed to alienate one of their customers – Zynga – and has the potential to alienate their other customer – the Farmville farmer and their friends. The offline analog here is a mall owner telling their store tenants that their customers can only use wampum to buy the stuff that they sell in their stores. And, that they’ll take a third of their revenue. And, that this decision gets a couple of years into the lease period without any prior warning. All of a sudden, customers that were used to using money to pay for things now have to go find wapum, or more likely, find stores that still accept money since that is what they have and that is what is accepted everywhere else they like to shop. Playing this out, it’s not hard to see how the mall owner loses in the end since customers find other places to shop. Stores, logically, follow customers as soon as they can exit – and those who can’t go belly up. The mall loses because stores and customers will find each other again in a more convenient platform where the transactions costs are not as high for either side.
So, I think this is a risky move for Facebook to make. There’s talk that Zynga is looking to create its own gaming social network which doesn’t seem all that far-fetched given the network they have built and the affinity that people have to the game. They just might be able to pull that off. The big question for Facebook is how many developers, entrepreneurs, and merchants - all important customers of their platform, are now looking at this decision and making new plans. We won’t know for a while. What we do know is that we’ve seen this movie on social networks before. The first movie was titled Friendster, the second was MySpace.
Can IP Commerce Create the Apps Store for Payments?
There’s no Steve Jobs strutting on the stage, massive consumer buzz, or slick television ads about how there’s an app just for you. But there are some things you’ve probably heard about and a soon-to-be known Denver based company, IPCommerce, is the invisible engine that’s powering them.
The New Age of Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Will Drive Growth in the Next Decade
The invisible engine model followed by Apple's iPhone has helped power the information technology industry for about three decades. Apple itself was one of the pioneers in encouraging developers to write applications for its desktop operating system. It invented the "software evangelist." Microsoft, though, was the maestro catalyst. Its Windows software platform attracted thousands of software developers and hundreds of millions of users. As a result it has been the durable center of a vast desktop-computer based ecosystem since at least the launch of Windows 3.0 in 1990. Invisible Engines tells the story of how software platforms have transformed industries including computers, video games, and handheld devices and then accelerated innovation. It then examines the forces behind the various business models that have been adopted in these industries. Many software platforms have decided not to charge developers while others have. Some have decided to vertically integrate into hardware while others have remained pure platforms.
How the iPhone Invisible Engine Provided a Catalyst for the Mobile Phone Industry
The iPhone provides a potent illustration of the invisible engines/catalyst business model. By the end of 2009 there were more than 100,000 applications available for the iPhone. These applications have been downloaded more than 3 billion times since Apple opened its iPhone store in July 2008. Apple's success has shaken up the mobile phone industry in many countries around the world. It has unleashed tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and created a multi-billion dollar application industry for mobile devices. Here is how an invisible engine helped make this.
Square vs. VeriFone: Who Will Win?
PYMNTS.com asked IP Commerce's Platform Evangelist, Tyler Hannan, to weigh in on the battle brewing between Verifone and up-start Square, and to look at its impact on the payments industry.
The Invisible Engines that Drive Innovation and Transform Industries
The use of software platforms to drive innovation and transform industries has exploded since the 2006 publication of my book Invisible Engines with MIT Professor and former Sloan School Dean Richard Schmalensee and Harvard Business School Professor Andrei Hagiu. Around the globe, invisible engines are ushering in a new era of technological change based on software. The Apple iPhone has shaken the mobile phone industry worldwide in part by creating a massive applications business built on the phone's operating system. Firefox has revolutionized the browser industry by encouraging developers to write add-ons and in doing so toppled Microsoft's Internet Explorer from dominance in many countries. Facebook has created a powerful social networking platform by opening itself up to developers. Amazon has started cloud-computing platform that enables entrepreneurs to access its vast software code, hardware and global communication systems over the Internet.
The Marriage of Mobile and Payments Make the World a Better Place
The Marriage of Mobile and Payments Make the World a Better Place
The Invisible Engine Wars: Amazon and PayPal’s App Strategy; Will MasterCard and Visa Fight Too?
Amazon and PayPal have both announced aggressive efforts to persuade developers to use their payment technologies. Each of them has opened up a gateway into their payment platforms. They are providing developers with tools for writing applications that use their payment technologies. And they are "evangelizing" their payment platforms to encourage lots of developers to take them up on this.
Mobile App Wars' Impact on the Payments Biz
The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
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