As crude oil continues to pour from the hole in the earth down in the Gulf of Mexico, social developers have been launching various campaigns to help out. Just today, however, CrowdStar started their own efforts to raise funds within their popular Facebook application, Zoo Paradise, in a campaign dubbed “CrowdStar Cares. ”

Reaching over 4.6 million monthly active users within Zoo Paradise (out of nearly 40 millionacross all their titles), the social game maker has launched a new virtual zoo animal called the Golden Sea Turtle. Costing 29 Facebook Credits, 100% of all proceeds generated will go directly to the National Wildlife Federation, who is attempting to raise enough funds to mobilize volunteers to help not only contain what they can of the oil spill, but attempt to protect the 400+ species of threatened wildlife.

Though 29 Credits cannot be purchased exactly, users can use methods such as PayPal, game cards, and various offer completions to earn them. If they wish to pay directly they can be bought in increments of 50, 105, and 240 that cost $5, $10, and $20 respectively. There appears to be no time limit posted (though it is stated to “limited”) for how long the Golden Sea Turtle animal will be around, so hopefully, it will be available for some time.

This is the second notable campaign from social games developers that we’ve seen recently, although virtual goods for charity is on track to be more of a trend. Earlier this week we noted Zynga’s partnership with the National Audubon Society and their Gulf Coast Turtle campaign that began recently.

On another note, it appears that CrowdStar has also updated all of its top five titles to incorporate virtual goods for the Gulf Spill cause. This includes a Peewee Sea Duck in Happy Pets, a Bottlenose Dolphin in Happy Acquarium, a Bottlenose Dolphin Pod in Happy Island, and a block of “Wildlife” in Hello City. As with the Golden Sea Turtle, 100% of all proceeds go to the National Wildlife Federation.

Given the difficulties in preventing damage and cleaning up the spill, every little bit counts.

Web measurement firm Compete has provided us with a closer look at the traffic Facebook received from other web sites in May. The data, which is broken down by category and by individual site, shows increases in referrals from entertainment sites, with small drops from email providers and other social networking services. Direct and search are the biggest sources of Facebook traffic, and those stayed roughly flat.

Overall, Compete showed Facebook growing by 2.1 million new US users in May to reach 123.8 million monthly unique visitors. This is roughly in line with other measurement firms, and indicates that Facebook grew despite the very public privacy controversies that unfolded over the month. See our post from earlier this week for more details on that topic.

Note that Compete’s “Channel Map” data visualization shows categories by share, not absolute numbers; the traffic details section, however, does show absolute numbers. You can check it out here.

The categories growing their shares the most, according to Compete, included music and videos, gaming, hobbies and interests, television and movie guide sites and sports. Many individual entertainment-focused sites integrated the Like Button and other social plugins in May, which could help explain the increases.

Overall, the site that sent by far the most new traffic to Facebook was Yahoo, including its many content subdomains: it contributed 293 million referrals in May, with an increase of 28.5 million. One reason for this growth might be Yahoo’s ongoing integrations of Facebook features — although much of what it’s planning has only just rolled out, or is not yet available.

The single biggest drop came in traffic from another social network — MySpace. That site sent a total of 67.6 million referrals to Facebook in May, the third largest after Google and Yahoo. But it feel by 1.86 million versus last month. Microsoft’s Live.com fell even more, down to 2.79 million to 54.8 million referrals. Dropping categories included dating (due to a massive, strange fall from Match.com), colleges and universities (school just got out) and email (no wonder Facebook executives have little enthusiasm for email).

Zynga has been assembling a big cash hoard in the last year. Between the $180 million it said it raised in December from aconsortium led by Digital Sky Technologies, and $147 million that it has not confirmed it has raised from SoftBank, the company could have something like $327 million in new funding.

Except it doesn’t, according to a string of deal terms pieced together over the last year by finance data company VC Experts. Here’s a quick look at what data we have available, and what it might mean; note that Zynga has steadfastly not commented on any of its funding moves in years, aside from announcing the DST deal.

Up until last fall, Zynga had a pretty typical-looking set of filings: when it raised money, the company would authorize stock and sell it you’d expect, with filings showing up showing as much.

The situation got stranger in mid-November, when a regulatory “Form D” filing showed up stating that the company had raised $15.2 million from previous investors, as an extension to its second round of funding from back in 2008. A reliable source had told us in the spring of 2009 that the company was raising around this amount of money, but that was never confirmed. The filing that appeared last November may have actually been raised then, and just filed later — more on this, further down.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook doesn’t publicly disclose its annual revenue and profit numbers. But the latest report, from Reuters, says it made up to $800 million in total revenue for 2009, with profit in the “tens of millions of dollars.” This number is higher than previous estimates, which have ranged as low as $500 million.

Why the wide range in estimates? From the report:

“They are downplaying their performance,” one source said, adding that 2009 revenue was more than double the previous year’s total. “There’s no upside in getting people’s expectations high, it’s always better to go low.”

Past reports put company revenue at $280 million to $300 million in 2008. We have estimated that Facebook made between $600 million and $700 million in revenue for 2009, mostly from growth in brand and performance advertising revenue. This year, we expect it to make up to $1.1 billion, largely through advertising. Facebook’s revenue from virtual goods has not been notably high, but that could change this year due to its efforts to make Credits the main virtual currency on its developer platform. Other estimates have pegged Facebook’s revenue growth to be as high as $2 billion.

This Tuesday, we published a sample of results from our most recent Inside Facebook Gold study, which surveyed Facebook users to determine how they perceive ads on the social network. While most people don’t mind ads, we found that their perception of specific ad categories tends to vary widely, between those they find least offensive (food and beverages) to the most offensive (dating ads).

Since our results seemed to interest many, we decided to return for a second look at two of the ad categories respondents answered questions about, games and dating, to see why they affect users the way they do.

Games

Game ads came in as one of the least “offensive” advertising categories, as you can see from the graph above. For some, this may be a surprising result. While there are millions of gamers on Facebook, a similarly large group does not play games. And in the period before Facebook changed its notification policies, games were gaining a reputation as intrusive, even spammy, as developers sought through wall posts and reminders to draw in more players.

The answer to this apparent puzzle may be that users do have a bias against games — but that any latent displeasure with Facebook games is mostly disarmed by the ads themselves. Since Zynga is one of Facebook’s most regular advertisers, we picked out three of their performance ads for a look.

Note that each ad utilizes bright colors and a fun, cartoony illustration. The headlines are non-demanding, and some copywriting skill has clearly gone into the brief descriptions below each picture. Although users are asked to play, the marketing is clearly non-aggressive.

In general, we saw similarities between most game ads — each publisher tends to concentrate on the fun of their game, without pushing too hard at potential users. Now, let’s take a look at the opposite.

Dating

About four times as many Facebook users picked dating ads as their most disliked category over gaming ads; as you can see on the graph above, almost half of all users picked dating ads out of the five categories we presented. The question is, why do users hate dating ads so much?

The answer is more complicated than you might expect. A great many Facebook users, in fact, should never see a performance ad for dating services at all, based on Facebook’s guidelines for running such ads: the person targeted must have reported themselves to be either male or female, single, over 18 and interested in receiving dating ads. Further, the image used cannot be explicit in any way.

Facebook’s strict policies toward dating ads likely came about over a year ago, when dating ads featuring scantily-clad women (hat-tip to Mashable for the picture at right) were still regularly appearing for many users. Searching for a dating performance ad today, we couldn’t find a single example.

However, dating ads do appear elsewhere on the network — and some could easily be considered offensive. Here’s a banner ad that we found displayed on a popular quiz application:

Not all of the banner ads we found induced users to cheat on their significant other, but it’s reasonable to expect that many users have come across similarly offensive ads.

Another possibility to consider is that Facebook users learned elsewhere to distrust or dislike dating ads. Many users may have first had profiles on MySpace, which made very little effort to clean up its dating ads. And of course there’s previous exposure to dating ads on the wider internet to consider, with all of its assorted scams and pornography.

In addition to the ads that users like least, our complete survey also explored what ad and product types users like best, and what changes would most improve their perception of ads. The full results, along with in-depth breakdowns of Facebook’s international audience and exclusive demographic data, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook

[Editor's note: This list is from late spring of 2010. It is not current. For the fall list, see this article, and for the latest day-to-day changes check out PageData. In other words, no need to comment saying that this list is outdated.]

The Facebook Pages with the largest number of fans are almost entirely relegated to entertainment — including musicians, actors, television shows and movies. According to Inside Facebook’s tool PageData, which counts how many fans Pages acquire, only seven of the Top 25 Pages on Facebook do not fall into this category.

The last time we took a look at the status of the Top 25 Pages on Facebook it was six months after Pages were introduced in 2008, when the U.S. presidential election was in full swing. Back then, candidate Barack Obama was on top with 834,550 fans while candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain made do with less than 200,000 a piece.

Politics only holds people’s attention for so long, it seems — the rest of the Pages were largely related to entertainment as well, primarily musicians.

Top 25 Facebook Pages

1. Texas Hold’em Poker – 19,440,702 people

2. Michael Jackson – 12,672,924 people

3. Mafia Wars – 12,540,270 people

4. Facebook – 9,737,014 people

5. Barack Obama – 8,773,340 people

6. Family Guy – 8,622,916 people

7. Vin Diesel - 8,514,437 people

8. Lady Gaga – 8,377,202 people

9. Starbucks – 7,671,258 people

10. Megan Fox – 7,120,146 people

11. House – 6,832,881 people

12. The Twilight Saga – 6,215,718 people

13. Dr. House – 6,075,306 people

14. South Park – 5,801,264 people

15. Linkin Park – 5,785,544 people

16. Coca-Cola – 5,707,554 people

17. Will Smith – 5,339,186 people

18. YouTube – 5,297,675 people

19. Lil Wayne – 5,245,830 people

20. Taylor Swift – 5,161,578 people

21. Justin Bieber - 4,934,515 people

22. Skittles – 4,837,473 people

23. Selena Gomez – 4,820,062 people

24. Grey’s Anatomy – 4,742,629 people

25. Oreo – 4,683,850 people

Of course much has changed since 2008, not the least of which is that there is no such thing as “fans” anymore, but rather, Likes. And although now-President Obama is still on the list, he’s lost his lead to move to fifth place, with slightly more fans than two years ago: 8.7 million.

As a matter of fact, it takes at least 4.6 million fans to get onto the Top 25 Pages these days. Some notable highlights from the list:

• Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker takes the cake with 19.4 million fans while Mafia Wars comes in third with 12.5 million.
• Barack Obama is now the only politician on the list, taking number 5 with 8.7 million Likes.
• Musicians rule in terms of raw numbers of Likes on Facebook: Michael Jackson in second place with 12.6 million fans, Lady Gaga at number 8 with 8.3 million, Linkin Park fifteenth with 5.7 million, Will Smith at seventeenth with 5.3 million, Lil Wayne nineteenth with 5.2 million, followed by Taylor Swift at number 20 with 5.1 million, then Justin Bieber at 21 with 4.9 million and number 23, Selena Gomez with 4.8 million.
• Actors were also popular on the list:  Number 7 Vin Diesel with 8.5 million LIkes, Megan Fox in tenth place with 7.1 million (technically Selena Gomez and Will Smith also count as actors).
• Television shows:  “Family Guy” in sixth place with 8.6 million Likes, “House” in eleventh place with 6.8 million, “Dr. House” at number 13 with 6 million, “South Park” follows at fourteenth with 5.8 million and “Grey’s Anatomy” at 24 with 4.7 million Likes.
• Movies, or at least movies popular with teenagers, were also present:  “The Twilight Saga” came in at number 12 with 6.2 million Likes.
• Global consumer brands filled out the rest of the list:  Facebook’s Page fourth with 9.7 million Likes, Starbucks ninth with 7.6 million, Coca-Cola at 16 with 5.7 million fans, YouTube at 18 with 5.2 million, Skittles at number 22 with 4.8 million and Oreo rounding out the list at number 25 with 4.6 million.

Judging from this most recent list, Facebook’s 2008 launch of Pages for businesses and other brands has been very successful. Pages that aren’t entertainment-related belong to global brands with millions of people around the world who Like their Pages. Some of these Pages, as well as others, are discussed in-depth in the latest edition of the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.

[Editor's Note: The following stats are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to visit Inside Facebook Gold and learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

When we recently surveyed US demographic data for 18 different leading apps by various developers, we found that, while users for these in apps generally trend young and female, certain apps like Zynga’s Texas HoldEm, with a 72.7% male audience, bucked the prevailing demographic trend.

But what about that other 70% of Facebook’s userbase that resides outside of the United States? Today we look at app demographics for Facebook’s second largest market by audience size, the United Kingdom. The data presented below is a sample of the full research and data offering we make available through Inside Facebook Gold.

In the UK, certain apps on the platform are even more dominated by a female audience than they are in the US. For several of the apps in this sample, women outnumber men two to one. One major exception is Zynga’s Mafia Wars, where there are twice as many male players than female players.

For our UK sample, we included some data on casual skill-based games to see how their player demographics differed from those of social role-playing games like Farmville. In the UK, PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz has a userbase that’s 69.6% female, and just 29.1% male. Compare that to Farmville’s 60.3% female and 38.4% male userbase.

Recall also that Farmville has been one of the defining titles of social gaming, contributing significantly to social games’ image as the “middle-aged housewives’” go-to online leisure activity. Even so, our data show that Bejeweled Blitz is even more female and more middle-aged (as we’ll see below) than social RPGs like Farmville.

The average gender distribution for the UK mirrors that of the US, but with slightly less gender disparity. In the UK, women make up, on average, 57.9% of social gamers, and men make up 41.0%. For reference, women make up 60.8% of the US social game audience and men make up 38.2%.

While most games fell in line with the average distribution, a few of the titles that didn’t make it into the sample presented here, but whose data is available in Inside Facebook Gold, were more popular with men. Can you guess which ones?

When it comes to age distribution, the UK looks a lot like the US. The 18 to 25 age group make up social gaming’s biggest audience segment, with one interesting exception.

Bejeweled Blitz, represented by the green line in the chart above, is vastly more popular with older (and, as we saw above, female) audiences, and even has a significant following in the 56 to 64 age group. Unlike Farmville and EA’s Restaurant City, it’s not a popular title among young users – only 7.0% of those between 13 and 17 play the game.

For this writer, these stats were brought to life during a recent layover in the Denver airport when I observed a silver-haired woman avidly playing Bejeweled on her laptop, over the airport’s free wifi. I credit this Bejeweled fan and social game influencer, who fell squarely in the 56 to 64 and female demographic overlap, with my current love of the game.

We will be looking at demographics for other countries, one by one, in future articles. The full demographic breakdowns for 12 top apps in Facebook’s UK market, including gender and age group splits and growth data when available, is available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes the monthly Global Monitor report on Facebook’s traffic growth around the world.

To gain access to the all the data we’re tracking, and to the specific growth projections we’ll soon be adding, please see Inside Facebook Gold at gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook.

Here’s our latest look at who Facebook has been hiring recently, as drawn from LinkedIn. For those tracking location and mobile, note that the company has hired a mobile program manager, Vikas Gupta, from out of location-based social service startup Loopt.

• David Breger is now a product manager at Facebook; he previously worked as a consultant ate L.E.K. Consulting, program manager at Disney Mobile and software engineer at Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard.
• Jim Brusstar has joined Facebook as a software engineering intern. He previously did the same job at Microsoft and worked as a network research and development intern at Merit Network.
• Vikas Gupta is a new mobile program manager at Facebook. Gupta’s leaving a job as a senior software engineer at Loopt and has previously worked similar positions at Glu Mobile.
• Kenny Kao is now a hardware test engineer at Facebook, having been a research and development engineer intern at Hewlett-Packard
• Laurence Patrick Noonan will be a summer intern at Facebook; he’s current an MBA candidate at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Noonan has worked as an associate at Commonwealth Capital Ventures, a senior consultant at Capgemini UK PLC and a staff consultant at Capgemini US LLC.
• Roel Spee is now on the Facebook team as a user operations analyst. Spee previously worked a media management internship at KPN, an intern at the Netherlands Water Partnership in India, as commissioner of marketing at Study Association RSM Erasmus University and as a student assistant at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.

And if you missed last week’s list, you can check it out here.

[Editor's Note: The following stats are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Following a down month in April, during which its userbase barely budged, Nigeria has rose back through the ranks in May to lead the African countries that we track as part of our monthly Global Monitor report on Facebook’s growth.

Nigeria’s volatility is understandable. With a total penetration of only one percent, including May’s increase of 254,320 monthly active users, it’s still a long way from being a big locale for Facebook. The country’s population of 151 million people suggests a large potential, but as we’ve seen with several other large countries, its growth is unlikely to become steady until the social network gets a firmer foothold. While that’s possible even in poor countries like Nigeria, where many users might log in with cell phones, it’s also much more difficult.

South Africa remained in its second-place position in May, with almost double its April growth. Unlike Nigeria, this relatively affluent country is likely to stay fairly steady from month to month. Its total penetration stands just short of 6 percent.

The northern pair of Morocco and Tunisia showed the most significant decreases in growth for the African region. Morocco’s growth fell by half, while Tunisia lost a third of its April momentum; together, the two added 159,210 new MAU in May. However, the growth rates of both countries are still respectable, and we won’t be surprised if they rise again next month.

Ghana and Kenya, located closer to the center of the continent, switched places in May; both are struggling to get past two percent penetration. Incidentally, these two are poster children for potential under-reporting, as anecdotal evidence suggests that quite a few people in these countries connect to Facebook through mobile devices or internet cafes. Facebook is also central to the news this month in Kenya, whose government is investigating a cabinet member for using the social network for hate speech.

Finally, tiny Mauritius is once again holding last place. But relative to its size, the island nation is growing strongly, and it looks set to maintain the highest penetration of the few African countries we’re currently tracking.

Africa’s total audience including Egypt (which we include in our Middle East post) rose to 12.4 million in May, out of a total population of 375 million. The composite growth rate was 8.6 percent, bringing penetration to 3.3 percent. Keep in mind that we source this data from Facebook’s advertising tools, which can run several weeks behind.

The full Global Monitor report is only available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes access to exclusive analysis. To sign up or get more information, please see Inside Facebook Gold at gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook.

Some users who list their Skype contact info in their profile are being greeted by a message on the Facebook home page informing them “now you can find your friends the easy way…with your Skype account.”

Clicking “Find Friends” leads users to a contact importer that allows them to send sign-up invites to their Skype contacts who don’t have Facebook accounts. These invites are integrated into Facebook Impact, which tracks your referrals and ranks you against your friends by how many people you’ve signed up.

The Skype contact importer is also available to everyone via the Who’s on Facebook? Find your friends link in the home page’s Get Connected section. ICQ is also available. Users previously only had the option to import contacts from various email services, AIM and Windows Live Messenger. However, since many people use Skype for professional purposes, inviting all of one’s Skype contacts to join and be your friend may not always be appropriate.

This feature does not address the longstanding request of users to be able to view a list of all of their Facebook friends who provide Skype contact info. This functionality, which would assist users in Skyping with their Facebook friends, is available from Facebook app Skype Me.

[Image from Dummies.com]