14 DAY TRIAL // 2009 was the year of virtual goods and the market exploded thanks in no small part to the rise of gaming on social networks, notably Facebook. Zynga is the biggest social-game developer and it now attracts an audience in the hundreds of millions of users. Its games, like Farmville, top the charts as Facebook's most popular apps and rely heavily on virtual-good sales for revenue. Even so, an interesting tidbit of info from last week's 2010 Media Summit in New York is still rather surprising, Zynga was PayPal's second largest merchant in 2009 right after eBay, which just happens to own PayPal.
The data comes from eBay itself, which says that virtual goods are becoming a major interest for the company's PayPal division. In total, PayPal processed about $500 million in virtual-good transactions in 2009, a pretty decent number for the very young market. Note that this isn't for Zynga alone, so there's no way of figuring out how much money the gaming company brought in last year. Of course, Zynga has other payment options as well.
Still, a big portion of that must have gone to Zynga, or it wouldn't have been the second biggest merchant on PayPal. On the whole, about $60 billion in transactions went through PayPal last year with several billions of those coming from eBay itself. The bulk, though, came from the big number of small companies, which is likely the reason why Zynga managed to take the number-two spot.
Zynga saw a huge growth in users and, presumably, in revenue too in the last year, but much of that was in the second half of the year, after Farmville was launched. According to Inside Social Games, Zynga now has over 240 monthly active users across all of its gaming properties, but started 2009 with about 15 million. 2010 is set to be a great year for virtual goods, but with such a young market, it's hard to predict by how much it will grow.