Gambit has been officially banned form Facebook for repeated violations.

To check out the Cease and Desist document click the link below:

Gambit Ban Document

TiVo and Google have reached a partnership to integrate its second-by-second time shifted TV viewing data into the measurement of ads sold through the Google TV Ads platform.

Google TV Ads is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes and reach 96 million households.

With this deal, Google is able to monitor TiVo’s 1.6 million subscribers’ viewing habits and are able to enhance the measurement and accountability of ad impressions for inventory sold using the Google TV Ads auction-based system. The deal covers all TV signal sources including digital cable, analog cable, satellite and over the air TV.

According to MrWeb: ‘Google TV Ads measures specific commercial ratings not simply averages, which is a key attribute of the TiVo data,’ said Todd Juenger, VP & General Manager, TiVo Audience Research & Measurement. ‘By using TiVo’s massive samples and second-by-second granularity in its currency measurement, Google TV Ads can now provide an order of magnitude of improved accountability for advertisers.’

www.google.com

www.tivo.com

Ali Moiz co-founder of Peanut Labs interviews Rick Marini of SuperFan. Rick recently founded a highly successful Website called SuperFan. SuperFan is becoming more successful daily and Rick and Ali touch on the reasons this is happening.

Rick was also the founder of Tickle.com which sold to Monster.com in 2004 for 100 million.

If you are a Publisher and would like to be involved in our series of interviews Please contact us at shane.bliemaster@Peanutlabs.com.

Become a fan on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peanut-…

Mike Arrington was not kidding when he said he would be watching Facebook game application companies and their offers. Over the weekend Arrington went on the attack again against Zynga, and CEO Mark Pincus. Arrington accused Zynga of blocking “scammy” offers from going into his and other prominent bloggers IP address, but allowing the offers to be provided to the everyday user.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/zynga-to-stop-all-in-game-offers/

This was quite an accusation that Zynga and Pincus immediately vehemently denied. “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 Arrington’s or anyone’s view”. That was part of the statement released by Pincus, and Zynga.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-into-zynga/

This could have been an honest mistake by Zynga and their offer provider DoubleDing, which is Zynga has invested in. Or it could be the conspiracy theory Arrington thinks it is. If you look at the screenshot below posted by Arrington you can see that his screen does not have the offers depicted in his post.

Either way, conspiracy, lies, or neither all offers on Zynga’s games are removed. Maybe it’s time to move to Market Research surveys??

We will keep you updated if any new details come in.

We at Peanut Labs have been following the whole Arrington vs. Anu offer controversy with great interest. As we mentioned in our post earlier in the week, much of the ensuing discussion on TechCrunch and elsewhere has centered around improving user experience.

We attended the Digital Media Conference West last week and sat in on an inspiring keynote from Craig Newmark – Craig commented on craigslist’s user culture and (paraphrasing him here) stressed the idea that if you take care of your customers, your business will succeed.

At Peanut Labs our team works tirelessly to see that our customer issues are resolved in a timely and considerate manner -we’re interested in engaging our user base as deeply as possible on this issue with offers. Over the weekend, we posed questions related to alternate payment options in social games to 11,500 of our users and we’ll be surveying users again shortly.

Our background as a research survey platform places us in a unique position to obtain high volumes of anonymized data and we are excited to be able to contribute aggregate data on user feedback regarding payment options in social gaming.

As a user, what questions would you like to see us asking related to this whole controversy?

Email support-media@peanutlabsmedia.com with your questions – we’ll pick the very best questions and add them to our next research survey.

For you curious folk out there in the blogosphere reading about users, a short explanation on how we get our users to fill out research surveys may be appropriate: We focus on pure research and anonymous data. Peanut Labs places market research surveys from leading market research firms such as Ipsos, Kantar and Nielsen on applications, social networks, blogs, and online games. Users give anonymous opinions on brands, movie trailers, etc. and for this valuable data, we compensate them with the appropriate in-game virtual currency or premium content – users generate value by giving us their time. Our largest verticals are consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and health care – industries that can afford to invest in market research and that depend on consumer opinions.

Update: Webs.com launches its own Application Platform and App store

Murtaza sat down for his second Publisher interview with Haroon Mokhtarzada co-founder and CEO of Webs.com.

Murtaza and Haroon Murtaza and Haroon touch upon the successes of Webs.com, how it was created, and what a young developer can do to emulate their successes.

Murtaza Hussain

Murtaza@peanutlabs.com

Haroon Mokhtarzada

Haroon@webs.com

Definitions:

Since some of the terms in the article below can be confusing, to make it easy on you, we’re defining them. For those of you who skip over notes like this, have no fear: we’ll define them again within the article itself.

A research survey in this article is a market research survey that users complete, giving their opinion in exchange for in-game virtual currency. These are run on behalf of Fortune 1000 companies and do not collect any personally identifiable information.

An offer is a CPA advertisement that users complete in exchange for in-game virtual currency.

By now you’ve probably heard about the showdown at Friday’s Virtual Goods Summit between Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, and Anu Shukla, founder of Offerpal. The showdown came at the conclusion of the “Payments Infrastructure for Virtual Goods” panel. For those who spent their Halloween weekend in the depths of costumed carousing, you can still check out the details of that on TechCrunch .

At Friday’s conference, both Shukla and Arrington spoke on behalf of the users regarding the quality of user experience. We agree with both parties that user experience is of paramount importance – over the weekend, we took things one step further and asked Facebook users what they thought. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest survey of its kind conducted on the FB platform.

We conducted a research survey of 11,678 users over the weekend across our publisher network (~500+ applications) with sample representative of the US online population. The users surveyed ranged from 13 – 60 years.  The average respondent plays 8 or more online games and spends nearly 7 hours a week playing online games. For more on our research data, please check out our appendix at the end of this post or feel free to email Lauren.

Key findings of survey:

1. Respondents prefer direct payment methods.
2. Respondents prefer research surveys to offers nearly 2:1.
3. Of the three types of CPA offers, respondents prefer free and paid to mobile offers. Only 10.84% of respondents had a positive experience with mobile offers.

In short, our survey found that Arrington is making a good point. The CPA offer-only ecosystem provides significantly less user satisfaction than other alternative payment options. Given the choice between CPA offers and other methods of earning in-game currency, users overwhelmingly favor the alternate (non-offer) means of earning in-game currency, such as market research surveys and direct payments. 26.5% of users preferred completing market research surveys to offers. Only 13.2% preferred offers. The majority (60.3%) preferred direct payments such as Paypal, prepaid game cards (like InComm, etc.) and mobile solutions (like Zong, Boku, Allopass, etc)

Users Report Dissatisfaction with CPA Offers: Mobile Offers are the Biggest Offender

Our survey asked users to rate their experiences with three different kinds of CPA offers: free, paid and mobile. The survey defined each type of offer for the user to make the distinctions clear. Offers are CPA advertisement that users complete in exchange for in-game virtual currency. Free offers require no form of payment, but do require users to submit personal/contact information while mobile offers require a user to submit their mobile phone number and agree to a subscription fee. Paid offers require a user to purchase something with a credit card in exchange for more in-game currency.

Nearly 90% of users we surveyed were either unhappy or neutral when it came to mobile advertising offers. Only 10.84% of users research surveyed responded positively to mobile offers (marking “satisfied” or “very satisfied”).

Comparing this with the data we collected on free and paid offers, it’s clear that users do not like mobile offers. These mobile offers are the type of offers Arrington referred to at the Virtual Goods Summit Friday as deceptive.

57.85% of users responded positively to free offers, marking “satisfied” or “very satisfied”, while 41.33% of users reported some degree of satisfaction with paid non-mobile offers such as Netflix and DirecTV.

Nearly 4 out of 5 (79.11%) users surveyed indicated they have never completed an advertising offer that required any form of payment for more in-game currency.

Nearly All Users Prefer Any Other Form of Payment to Offers: Research Surveys and Direct Payments FTW

What do we mean by research surveys? The term requires definition here, since Arrington refers to some types of CPA offers as “surveys” in his Halloween post. The “surveys” Arrington refers to in his post are a form of CPA offers (stuff our competition runs and calls ‘Surveys’) and are not to be confused with the market research surveys Peanut Labs features as an alternative payment method for users.

The research surveys Peanut Labs features are unique to Peanut Labs and are anonymous market research surveys used by top brands to improve their products.  These research surveys should not be confused with the quizzes labeled as “surveys” as they are true market research surveys provided by our partners (Honomichl Top 50 firms such as Ipsos, Kantar and Nielsen) – users are compensated for their opinion only as these research surveys do not pass on any contact information to third parties. In 2008, Peanut Labs partnered with market research firms representing over 150 of the top Fortune 500 companies and in 2009 provide 70% of social media sampling (source: Cambiar industry report).

In the interest of full disclosure, Peanut Labs also provide users with CPA offers as part of our full suite of options for earning more in-game currency on our platform. Since offers and research surveys are integrated on our iframe, Peanut Labs users are familiar with both research surveys and offers, along with options such as direct payment and SMS payment.

After conducting the survey, we looked at our respondent data on both offers and surveys completed within Peanut Labs. Interestingly, we found that all the users we surveyed complete at least twice as many market research surveys as offers. Users between 20 and 29 complete nearly 4.5 times as many research surveys as offers while users between 40 and 49 of both sexes complete over 7 times as many market research surveys as offers. The specific numbers on that are below.

Across our user network, the average Peanut Labs user who completes a market research survey has already completed 5 or more market research surveys through Peanut Labs. We see about 90% fewer users returning to complete additional offers after completing their first offer.

A comparison of revenue from offers and research surveys confirms this finding – while offers do provide a source of revenue for our publishers, the revenue is a flash in the pan compared with research surveys, which provide a more sustainable, long-term solution for monetization.

Observed Revenue Trend with Research Surveys & Offers

X-axis: Number of Weeks, Y-axis: eCPM

*for an average typical set of 1000 daily active users from the same site or game over 12 weeks

We’re interested in hearing more from users on their experiences with research surveys on our platform, along with offers on our platform and others – you can reach us at support-media@peanutlabsmedia.com.

Appendix: For You Data Nerds

The only screenout question for the research survey identified whether the user has a competing interest (i.e., works in online advertising) in completing the survey.

The majority of users who participated in our research survey work full time and identify as suburban and white/Caucasian.

Over 80% reported that they are at least partially responsible for financial decisions of household, whether as the sole decision maker or making financial decisions jointly with other members of the household.

We found low level of penetration for the surveyed users monetizing elsewhere online:

- 22.55% purchase or pay for services online (utilities, bills)

- 24% purchase real goods online (i.e., shoes, clothing, gadgets, event tickets, books, food)

- 14% pay for premium content online (such as membership to online sites)

- 18% watched ad-supported free streaming television or movies

Today is the Digital Media Conference at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. Peanut Labs will have a booth and will be distributing (keeping with our theme) peanut M&M’s, peanut pens, Nutter Butter cookies, business cards, flyers, and since it’s so early…lots of Red Bull to ourselves.

Murtaza Hussain, Peanut Labs co-founder also has a speaking spot on a panel at 10:30. Murtaza will be speaking on how companies can make money from the wealth of data they’re collecting about our opinions, friendships and behaviors online. What business models are emerging to monetize this valuable data, and what are the privacy issues and what is the future for businesses focused on collecting data online.

Panelists

Dave Goldberg, CEO, Survey Monkey
Murtaza Hussain, Founder & President, Peanut Labs
Sharon Ringley, Co-Founder, TwinLogic Strategies
Jason Lopatecki, CSO, TubeMogul
Moderator: Ned Sherman, CEO & Publisher, Digital Media Wire

Contact: Murtaza@peanutlabs.com

With Google Wave still in it’s infancy, Google is already looking to find ways to monetize it. On Monday Google confirmed that they are working on an iPhone/Android like application store where Google Wave users can go to buy add ons for their Google Wave account. This will also make it possible for developers to earn money for their effort’s.

A Wave marketplace could stock in-Wave applications, along with desktop applications, browser extensions and a world of devices, from laptops, phones, tablets and more with built in Wave support. Independent software developers have already built and tested successful applications for the Wave platform and Google is hoping this will be as big if not bigger than Apples iPhone application software.

Just like the iPhone app store, the implementation of a Wave app store and the opportunity to make money will turn Google Wave into a developer feeding frenzy.

Murtaza sat down for his second Publisher interview with Haroon Mokhtarzada co-founder and CEO of Webs.com.

Murtaza and Haroon Murtaza and Haroon touch upon the successes of Webs.com, how it was created, and what a young developer can do to emulate their successes.

Murtaza Hussain

Murtaza@peanutlabs.com

Haroon Mokhtarzada

Haroon@webs.com