Virtual Coins, Chinese Open Platforms Trying Monetization

How to make the money out of the Open Platform? This is probably one of the toughest questions in the global industry and there is no perfect answer to it so far. In the fast-growing Chinese web, millions of users are now willing to spend money on virtual goods, thanks to QQ and other online game operators which have developed this market for a few years. Now the SNS operators are trying to monetize their Open Platform, the solution is: Virtual Coins.

While Google is doing great job on educating Chinese web developers, 51.com, the No.2 SNS which has recently launched its own Open Platform is holding its developer event today in its office in Shanghai. The most interesting part is that, 51 will first time introduce its Virtual Coin API to its developers, which means the third-party developers (especially for those web-game developers) can take advantage of this and make some money.

Comsenz, another big player in Chinese SNS market and owner of UCHome has also implemented Virtual Coin-like API into its own open platform standard, Manyou. Kevin Day, CEO of Comsenz showed me the demo in Korea, a Manyou-compatible web-game in which you need buy virtual coins in order to power up your avatar.The money earned will be shared with Comsenz and the webmaster of UCHome.

SNS+Online Game+Open Platform, will that be a perfect combination for monetization? I think in Asia, there is a high possibility.