Archive for February, 2010

Monetize More Users with Offerpal TASKS

Today Offerpal unveiled its latest product to help social game developers monetize their users — Offerpal Tasks. Built by leveraging Amazon Mechanical Turk, Offerpal Tasks allows gamers and social networkers to earn virtual currency for free by completing what Mechanical Turk calls “Human Intelligence Tasks” — small online tasks that, however simple, require some degree of human intelligence to complete.

For example, users can rate search results, categorize articles, answer questions, proofread content, tag photos or conduct any number of similar tasks, and earn the virtual currency they need to engage deeper within your game. At the time of this writing, there were more than 60,000 tasks available to be completed.

How It Works

Offerpal Tasks is accessible as a tab within the Offerpal I-Frame, right alongside our other alternate payment options like offers, surveys and shopping. If they haven’t done so already, the user first creates an account with Mechanical Turk, and then they are able to browse through the site’s thousands of available tasks, selecting a task they want to complete based on the type of work, how long it is estimated to take, and how much it pays.

Once the work is completed and the person who requested the job approves it, the funds appear in the user’s Amazon Payments account. At that point the user returns to our I-Frame within your game, clicks the Amazon Payments button, and is able to spend their balance to purchase your virtual currency.

Why It Matters

The whole point behind alternate payment options like offers, surveys and shopping is to increase the percentage of users you are able to monetize. With direct payments like credit cards and PayPal, maybe you can get somewhere between 1 – 4% of users to purchase virtual currency. Add offers into the mix, and you’ll probably monetize another 2-3%. Add surveys and that percentage goes up again. Keep in mind, this is all incremental lift. Through alternate payment options that let your users essentially “earn” virtual currency for free rather than having to pay for it, you can monetize users that weren’t ever likely to purchase virtual currency with real money.

Alternate payments have also proven to be an excellent way to introduce users to your virtual economy and convert them into repeat customers — our studies show that about 30% of first-time offer takers go on to conduct more transactions in the future, oftentimes through direct purchases. Offerpal Tasks helps widen your monetization funnel by further increasing the percentage of users who become “paying users.”

How to Get It

Offerpal Tasks was recently pushed out across most of our network, and if you’re already using our I-Frame, chances are Tasks already appears as an option within your game. However, if you are not using our cash bar, or if for some reason you are not using the Amazon Payments option within our cash bar, then Offerpal Tasks will not appear within your I-Frame. To have it turned on, or with any questions at all, contact publishersupport@offerpal.com.