All Farmville-ers, Mafias, Fishers and other game players on Facebook, now you can buy virtual items using PayPal. Popular social networking service Facebook has tied up with PayPal for advertising and developer systems. This 'strategic relationship' will allow PayPal to be the common payment bridge between Advertisers-Facebook and Users-Facebook. Under this Facebook-PayPal partnership, Facebook will rollout a new feature called Facebook Credits that could be used to buy virtual items from games like Happy Aquarium, Restaurant City and others. Facebook's Farmville, Fishville and Mafia Wars are few of the many popular games that are played worldwide. So gamers can buy Facebook Credits using PayPal and earn virtual items for these games. Yes, we do see a Second Life phenomenon waiting to happen.
This way Facebook will make their cut and of course, the game developers will earn their share too. Looking at the volume of users logged in to play games on Facebook, we can assume significant income waiting for the socialnetwork. Even though Facebook faced some security issues in the past few months, the service has strengthened its privacy options and security features.
The advertisers would get option of PayPal for Facebook and thus buy ads. In either case, Facebook would be making huge amount of money from Ads and Apps (read: games). Research marketing firm eMarketer expects ad spending on Facebook to rise up to $605 million this year.
This however, isn't great news for Indians for we already know that PayPal is facing some issues with Reserve Bank of India. Due to this, all payments from and to India via PayPal have been blocked.
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