Zynga Removes All Ad Offers After Facebook Suspends New Game

Over the weekend Zynga launched what was widely speculated to be its next major hit: FishVille, an "aquarium" game meant to capitalize on the success of up-and-coming social app developer CrowdStar's big hit, Happy Aquarium. By Sunday evening, though, FishVille had been taken offline by Facebook for non-compliance with its new advertising standards. The violations were caused by the presence of mobile ad offer scams in the new app's offer wall, served by an ad offer network called Double Ding. 

Following FishVille's removal (after it had amassed 875,000 users in roughly two days), Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced earlier today all CPA ad offers would be removed from Zynga games by the end of today. The impact this could have on Zynga's bottom line could be tremendous. Statements made by Zynga employees to the San Francisco Chronicle in the past have indicated that over half of the company's revenues are generated by advertising and ad offers that users accept in return for virtual currency.  

FishVille was a game fairly similar to other Zynga social games, just themed around raising fish in an aquarium rather than creating a mob, tending to a farm, or creating theme parks. Users could populate a fish tank, take care of the fish inside, and later sell them off in order to earn money that could buy better fish tanks. Early looks at the game in action compared it very favorably to Happy Aquarium, owing to Zynga's more polished social features. 

The mobile scam offers appeared in FishVille allegedly due to a mistake made by one of Zynga's many ad offer network partners, Double Ding. Zynga had asked all partners to remove the mobile offer category from its games, since that category is home to the vast majority of all scam offers. According to Zynga, all networks complied but Double Ding accidentally left six mobile offers in its queue. Upon being notified of this by Zynga, the company claims that Double Ding immediately removed the offers. Regardless, Facebook still opted to suspend FishVille. 

The Third-Party Problem

Zynga previously worked with six different ad offer providers, with ad offer content provided by each controlled by that particular network. Mark Pincus cited this as the reason why Zynga would remove all ad offers until such time that "we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves." Clearly Zynga wants the current ad offer networks to give them tools for filtering offers in-house. 

The issue that keeps publishers like Zynga from filtering offers effectively right now is that the tools currently offered are "reactive" rather than "proactive," according to statements made by Pincus to Venture Beat. While offers can be filtered out of a publisher's ecosystem once they have appeared, there is nothing that allows publishers to prevent offers from appearing at all. With thousands of offers appearing in most network databases, effective filtering isn't possible even as a full-time job until more sophisticated approval systems are made available to publishers. 

This was clearly the case with the Double Ding mobile offers spotted in FishVille when it went up over the weekend. What makes the issue with Double Ding hit very close to home is that Zynga invested an undisclosed amount in the ad offer start-up, as disclosed by Pincus in his announcement regarding the removal of ad offers from Zynga's games. Double Ding President Matt Handel said the offers appeared due to a bug and would only have been seen by 10% of all users.

That was still enough to get Facebook to pull a new game published by the largest and most successful app developer currently active on the platform. Clearly this is a signal to other app developers on the platform that the rules have changed and flagrant scams may no longer be tolerated. What happens with Zynga, its ad offer network partners, and the social gaming scene over the next few weeks may prove defining in the rise of social gaming. 

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