Zynga has soared to dominance in the social gaming market, enabling users to play and interact with each other over a number of games, ranging from virtual world games to role-playing, puzzle and card games.
Zynga claims a combine 184 million monthly active users of it's five most popular games on Facebook, with an additional presence n Myspace, Yahoo and mobile platforms. Over 40 million of their players have purchased virtual chips or are communicating regularly on their progress via Zynga's platform.
TechCrunch blog has estimated annualized yearly revenue rate based on May 2010 numbers of $600 million, or $50 million a month with estimates of $15 million in earnings per month, or 30% net margin.
There has been much speculation in the poker world as to whether Zynga would want to become a player in the future U.S. regulated online poker market, pushing it's huge customer base to play for real money. Despite that future uncertainty, Zynga deserves a lot of credit for effectively converting 1%-2% of its significant audience into paying customers. At present rates Zynga could take the lion's share of the estimated $5 billion of social gaming sector revenues predicted by 2015, with current estimates at around $1 billion a year.
In the development of the site, Zynga has raised over $500 million in VC funding, from firms like Foundry Group, Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Avalon Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Digital Sky Technolgoies, Softbank and Google.
