New Zynga S-1 Docs: Traffic Guarantees From Facebook, but No Canvas Ad Revenue
A recent set of updates to Zynga’s S-1 document sheds new light about the company’s business position, as it prepares for an initial public offering. For starters, Google has indeed invested, although the terms were not disclosed.
More interesting is the special relationship that Facebook and Zynga have formalized over revenue and traffic, in two developer addendums. (You can find the full set of docs here, although sadly some of the most interesting bits have been removed).
At first glance, the terms read as if Zynga had a special deal with Facebook, where it gets a portion of the ad revenue from Facebook ad units that run alongside its games in canvas apps. However, the terms specific that it is not canvas app ad revenue – instead, it’s referring to Zynga web sites like FarmVille.com, or even Facebook ads that might run within games.
We asked Facebook about the matter and got this response: “When we reached our agreement with Zynga last year, we discussed the possibility of displaying ads sold by Facebook on some of Zynga’s own pages. This isn’t something we’ve opted to do so far, and we are not working on an ad network right now.”
