Zynga Corporation, the company behind several popular games on the world’s largest social network, Facebook, has now earned the number one spot for its new game CityVille, which launched about a month ago.
The objective of CityVille is to build and manage a virtual city from the ground up, with social features that allow users to interact with other user built cities, including the ability to buy land and open store franchises, all with a common virtual currency.
Zynga earns revenue from CityVille as users purchase premium features to use in building their city, a business model that could earn the company up to $700-million in total revenue in this fiscal year, according to analyst expectations.
According to data published by AppData, the new Zynga game, CityVille, has about 16.8-million daily users playing the game, with about 61.7-million monthly active players.
The second most popular social game on Facebook, FarmVille, which is also produced by Zynga, has about 16.4-million monthly active users, with about 56.8-million monthly users.
Zynga has experienced tremendous success in online social gaming, having produced four of the top five most popular games on Facebook, including other titles such as Texas Holdem Poker, and FrontierVillie, where each have about 35-million, and 31-million monthly players, respectively.
Zynga is a well-capitalized firm, having received over a hundred million of dollars in venture capital from various partners.
In the most recent round of raising venture capital, the company got a huge $180-million capital injection, led by Digital Sky Technologies, the same company that purchased a marginal stake in Facebook for $200-million, at $10-billion valuation in May 2009.
You’ll also remember that about two years before that capital investment, Microsoft Corp made a $240-million investment in Facebook at a $15-billion valuation, when the social network at the time had about 200-million registered users.
Since then, Facebook’s valuation has fluctuated significantly as investors have had a difficult time in understanding Facebook’s business model, and forecasting the true costs and future expected cash flows.
Fast-forward to today, Facebook now has over 500-million registered users worldwide, with the success of the site and all of the great philanthropic work by Facebook’s 26 year old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who pledged $100-million to Newark’s school system, and even pledged to donate half of his net worth to charity, prompted Time Magazine to make Zuckerberg the magazine’s person of the year for 2010.
Zynga has 115 total employees, 11 of whom are higher level managers, the company also has ten different venture capital partners who have invested in the company, including Digital Sky Technologies, Avalon Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, among others, including two private investors like Reid Hoffman who is founder and chairman of the popular professional online social network, LinkedIn.
Combined with all of Zynga’s titles, the company currently has more than 261-million Facebook users playing its games.
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