Viximo

Virtual goods is new to most established companies, and many don’t know where to get started.  Knowing where you should be spending your time in planning, implementing, and managing your virtual economy is a major Key To Success.  In many cases, the area that companies should arguably be spending the most time on, content, is often overlooked and ignored.  As a result, at Viximo we evangelize to our partners the need to focus on content for the following reasons:

Content Defines The Virtual Goods Experience

Content heavily impacts the overall social experience of the product.  What type of virtual goods use case you implement, and the overall inventory, defines why your users should purchase virtual goods.  In order for virtual goods to be successful, the content needs to accomplish at least one of the three primary reasons why users buy virtual goods.  Achieving this requires embedding the content within the social behaviors of the user.  Payments, analytics, and other required infrastructure of a virtual goods model don’t impact why users would buy virtual goods.

Content Is The Primary Driver of Virtual Goods Revenue

Your content is the actual merchandise that you are selling to your users and is the primary factor in converting interested users into actual purchasers.  Consider an example of buying physical merchandise. If you are looking for new clothes, are you going to shop in a store that has trends from three years ago and doesn’t keep their inventory fresh season to season?  Are you going to buy the clothes if  they are low quality?  Or maybe you end up in the store due to a great promotion, but once you get there none of the clothes are anything you want.

The point is that while your virtual content/merchandise might be “just pixels,” many of the same rules apply to virtual merchandise as they do to physical merchandise.  A store is only as good as its merchandise.  The content needs to be high quality, fresh, targeted, and accomplish the objective  the user is seeking to achieve by buying it.  In fact, Viximo has done supporting research to measure how these elements directly impact revenue.  You can do an amazing job driving users to a storefront, but if they get there and don’t see anything they want or understand why it is valuable to them, they won’t convert to purchasers.

Content Is Difficult and Expensive

As stated above content that is high quality, targeted, and fresh is going to have a major impact on your virtual goods revenue.  When you combine these elements, content becomes not only time consuming, but expensive.   In fact, CyWorld one of the most experienced and profitable virtual goods companies contracts with over 4400 designers to be able to execute on their content needs.  Add in additional options, such as branded or sponsored goods that require business development deals, and the difficulty is multiplied.  Even if you don’t use services like Viximo’s content marketplace, we encourage you to carefully plan how you will generate hundreds to thousands of high quality virtual items every year given that with most publishers it is not typically a core competency.

Other Components Are More Easily Solvable

Hopefully by now you see the importance of content and why it requires your attention.  But there are other pieces to a virtual goods implementation such as currency/payments and analytics.  However, those other pieces are much easier to put into place.

Take payments for example.  There are 20+ payment companies, most with very similar feature sets and fees.  You could spend countless hours evaluating the 20+ payment companies out there.  In the end, even if you end up with the best payment infrastructure in the world, if you don’t have content that people want to buy, it won’t matter.

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