Social Network Scams
I’m really not a fan of Michael Arrington, as he sometimes seems to indulge in horrid character/startup assassination for page views, but he’s written an important couple of pieces on scamming in social games: Scamville, and a follow-up piece on companies that tried the same offers, became very uncomfortable and now get by without these dubious revenue streams.
It being the US Techcrunch, I was sceptical at first (they sometimes go off half-cocked, for example with this debacle they created over Last.fm), but I’ve seen a number of game developers who make social games saying they were wondering when people were going to start talking about this. It seems the most successful business models at the moment may be the most hard nosed, exploitative ones, with somewhat limited options for companies that don’t want to mucky themselves.
Despite social networking settling on a few major players that have been bought or are at least part owned by giants, the opening up to 3rd party applications means it’s still the wild west out there, with plenty of snake oil to go round. The kind of scams outlined in the first of those Techcrunch posts are basically similar to SMS scams that trick people into signing up for £10 a week SMS subscriptions, but the follow up post encouragingly shows a couple of companies that have been operating for years without needing them. Business cases for social games will emerge over the next few years, and while these scams will never quite go away, more users will get wise to them and I imagine they’ll be relegated to murky corners of social network sites, much like they have been on the rest of the web.
(CC image by joelogon)
