Offers provider TrialPay is making it easier for publishers to serve deals from Flash sale sites like Rue La La and group buying startups like Groupon within games.

It has launched DealSpot, a way to have targeted deals appear in games, that expands some of the company’s earlier experiments in moving beyond conventional offers through partnerships with social buying startups like Groupon and LivingSocial. Group buying deals are an emerging area that allow people to get discounts on goods and services if they buy en masse.

TrialPay takes these deals, places them in games, where a user can earn additional virtual currency on top of the offer if they buy it from a game. For example, TrialPay served a Gap Groupon within Playfish’s Sorority Life’s game and offered virtual currency on top of the deal to get $25 off purchases worth more than $50.

So far, the company has been testing the new service in beta with Playdom, Playfish and iWin, which said its offers-based revenue doubled for its Family Feud title.

“This is really a new form of advertising,” said Terry Angelos, TrialPay’s chief product officer. “If you think about how you as an advertiser reach 50 million consumers, well, here’s a way that you can do that.”

The deals appear in dynamically loaded Flash components and TrialPay offers an application programming interface so publishers can have direct access to deals. Game designers can also customize how the deals will look inside their applications. Angelos says DealSpot saves a game publisher the trouble of negotiating with flash sale and group buying companies on their own.

“If a gaming company does this, they’d have to get one of their studio artists to design the deal, then they’d have to insert it into their gaming experience,” he said. “While it isn’t difficult, it’s time-consuming and it interrupts their game design process.” DealSpot also matches deals to consumers based on their location or gender.

Angelos said game publishers are still struggling to monetize more than a small percentage (usually one to three percent) of their players and that deals for a wider range of more tangible goods and services could help some companies double their offers-based revenue.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Offer provider TrialPay is launching a new product today that enables game publishers to monetize social currency offerings, called DealSpot. The new product essentially allows games to offer exclusive deals to game players within a game, as opposed to the offers appearing in a separate game outside of the game (often called the ‘offer wall’).

The company is partnering with Groupon, Tippr and Living Social for local deals, LOVEFiLM for subscription entertainment, branded retailers such as Yves Rocher and Lancôme for shopping, Rue La La and Mertado for flash sales and more. Deals automatically appear in games and prompt a user to click on the link to receive the exclusive deal to earn virtual currency.

DealSpot has been running in private beta on Playdom’s Sorority Life, Playfish’s Restaurant City and iWin’s Family Feud. And TrialPay allows publishers to offer the deals based on player performance. For example, iWin will use DealSpot to display special promotions to players who have reached certain levels in Family Feud. Another example of an implementation took place within Playdom’s Sorority Life campaign, which rewarded players who purchased a Groupon for $25 off a $50 purchase at Gap also received with the game’s “Brownie Points.”

TrialPay received a big vote of confidence when Facebook selected the offer provider to power in-game and shopping offers for Facebook Credits. Peanut Labs, which was recently acquired, was also used by Facebook for its offers initiative. And Peanut Labs has its own deal-focused offer product, called Cherry Deals.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is steadily converting partners like Zynga away from their home grown payment product to Facebook Credits. And to date there’s just one alternative for users who want to complete offers like getting a Netflix subscribtion in exchange for Farmville credits, or whatever – Trialpay. Offerpal, one of the largest offer providers, is responding to that decision. With layoffs.

In an open letter to be published later today, Offerpal CEO George Garrick talks about the reasons behind the downsizing, and the company’s new focus on other platforms:

As most of you probably know, Facebook has launched Facebook Credits, and certain Facebook games and applications have or will transition from their proprietary currencies to FB Credits.

Facebook has indicated to us that at least initially they have selected another provider to be their alt-pay partner for purchases of Facebook Credits. We respect this decision, maintain a good working relationship with Facebook, and will do our best to facilitate the smoothest possible transition for those games which move to the Credits system. However, this means that for the applications we currently serve which do switch to Credits, once that change happens the user traffic to those games that originates from Facebook will no longer be served by Offerpal.

We will continue to fully support Facebook applications which do not switch to Credits, we will as I mentioned do our best to ensure the smoothest possible transition for those applications which do switch, and we will continue to serve our valued developer partners on other Internet platforms and destination sites as well as on mobile platforms.

But like any good business, we must balance our costs with our revenues by business area. This means that we must downsize our Facebook operations in order to adjust to an anticipated lower scale of Facebook user traffic, while we also re-focus our resources on our growth areas including other gaming platforms, open web gaming, new Internet verticals, and most importantly mobile through our Tapjoy subsidiary.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, some of the outstanding people who have worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to monetize Facebook games will have their positions at Offerpal eliminated. I thank them for their dedication, effort and contribution, and will do whatever I can to help them find exciting new career opportunities.

Meanwhile, Offerpal is currently the largest offers and alt-pay provider world-wide. Offerpal’s business continues to grow and expand in numerous other areas including an exciting new agreement with Yahoo!, and on the mobile iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, with more to come. We are projecting continued strong growth going forward as well as sustained profitability.

Finally, we would like to thank our 2,000+ developer partners for their continuing support of Offerpal and we look forward to continuing to work with all of you as we collectively grow our exciting new industry.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last month, Facebook started experimenting with a new payment option for a select handful of game developers: it began supporting Offers as a way to earn its virtual currency, Facebook Credits. Now, the site is beginning to expand that test — this morning I noticed that clicking the ‘Get More Credits’ link at the top of Facebook’s application page showed me a new option: “Earn for free by shopping”. Selecting that displays 38 different offers through a partnership with offer provider TrialPay.

In other words, Facebook is no longer restricting its Offers testing to just games. We’ve confirmed that Facebook is currently testing this broader implementation of Offers, though it is currently only being shown to some users.

Offers allow users to ‘earn’ virtual currency without paying for it directly — for example, you get a bonus of 220 Facebook Credits for signing up for Netflix, or 85 credits for signing up for the latest Groupon deal — and they’ve proven to be very popular among app developers.

But Offers have also been a touchy subject for Facebook. Facebook is only now entering the arena itself, but Offers have long been available through an array of third parties, some of whom were tempting users with scammy deals from less-than-reputable sources. The problem reached a head during our 20+ post series on Scamville. Since then Facebook has cracked down on the bad players and the big names have cleaned up their act.

There’s too much money on the table for Facebook to ban Offers entirely, which is why the company is working with TrialPay and Peanut Labs to only promote its own line of officially-sanctioned promotions, all of which are from trusted brands.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thanks to the increase in number of gamers signing up for flower delivery offers for Moms, Mother’s Day was payday for social game publishers this year, with ad-funded payments skyrocketing during the holiday. TrialPay, a startup that powers an offers-based payments platform on Facebook, has released a number of data points that show the strength of the Mother’s Day market this year.

Mothers Day represents a huge gift giving market, second only to the holiday season. Last year lone, $14.1 billion was spent on Mother’s Day-related gifts. In the week leading up to Mother’s Day, about $1 million per day was generated by “gifts for mom” promotions that paired offers from online flower merchants like 1-800-Flowers with free in-game virtual goods and currency. According to TrialPay, social game publishers running Mother’s Day campaigns saw five-fold increase in offer-based revenue, which generally accounts for 15-20% of a social game’s total revenue.

Visitor conversion rates more than doubled during Mother’s Day (player-to-payer conversions). And 40% of consumers were first-time buyers that had never made a purchase through a game.

TrialPay Facebook-focused offers platform is used by a number of big-name social game publishers including Playfish and Playdom. In fact, Facebook recently announced its foray in the offers game, and partnered with TrialPay to use their offers in the test round. Clearly, there’s a lot of money in the offers space and Facebook wants a piece of the pie.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch