Secret of Facebook’s Success: Zynga

If you’ve ever been sucked into Facebook games like FarmVille or Zynga Poker and wasted hundreds of hours of your life in the blink of an eye, you might not be surprised to learn that Zynga, the company behind the games is one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley. Vanity Fair has up a longish profile of the founder and CEO, Mark Pincus:

Facebook’s success, on a business level, owes something to Pincus, although most people don’t realize it. The dirty little secret of Facebook is that there isn’t really much to do there once you’ve finished looking at pictures of your friends’ babies and your crush, and signed up for a few pages run by political causes. “Is Facebook a success because of Zynga, or is Zynga a success because of Facebook?” asks Michael Pachter, a video-game analyst at Wedbush Securities. “The answer is both. But the truth is that it’s a delicate eco-system.” Zynga’s games are expected to claim at least $850 million in earnings this year. David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, says, “Zynga could account for as much as 10 percent of Facebook’s revenues this year, a lower percentage than last year but still very significant.” “We’re going to have billions of people on social networks, so if a third of the people on Facebook love games, about a third don’t, and a third are indifferent, you’re still talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of people playing Zynga games,” says famed venture capitalist John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, which has invested heavily in Zynga. “These games are not for everyone, it’s true, but it’s for more of everyone than anything else I know.”

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