Orca Offers Monetization Services for Social Games and Beyond

As virtual goods become more mainstream, a range of companies are trying to provide virtual goods services to anyone who wants to use them, from social game developers to social networks themselves and other web sites. Orca is the latest to emerge, having launched last August. Its white-label services include digital gift cards, payments and virtual currency systems, and rewards. More established rivals, like PlaySpan and Live Gamer, have focused on providing their services to gaming companies. While they are expanding beyond games, too, Orca's focus is broad, including non-gaming destinations, like entertainment sites. Orca's products include: Payments: A white-label service where a company can offer users a PayPal-style payments service but with their own brand. Users can store payment information, like a credit card number, with the brand. Rewards: This service lets a brand have their own service for earning digital points, and converting them in to rewards. It also offers digital gift cards, so a brand can provide a set amount of points in a digital format for users to give to each other. Virtual Currency: Similar to rewards, companies can create a system for accepting real-money payments in exchange for virtual currency. The currency can also be traded, gifted, earned as a bonus, or through an online affiliate. Orca offers additional features, including analytics, a way to communicate with users, and pre-ordering. The big idea here is that virtual goods are becoming a more mainstream way of making money online and all sorts of sites are going to want to implement some form of virtual monetization system in order to capitalize on the trend. There are already quite a few examples of what Orca wants to enable, that people might not think of as virtual goods. For example, airlines have long offered frequent flier miles in exchange for using a branded credit card or participating in other offers. With Orca, as chief executive Roger Wood tells us, any company can implement whatever part of its monetization service that it feels is the right fit for its plans. Instead of having PayPal or another brand clearly providing the service, Orca lets the site take control of the image around the product.

Social Pro Daily

Orca Offers Monetization Services for Social Games and Beyond

Eric Eldon

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Eric Eldon