Bunchball masquerades as a network of casual game widgets that you play within a social network like Facebook -- not unlike competitors Zynga and the Social Gaming Network. But it's really doing much more. It collects data about your behavior when you play, and uses that data to build games and virtual worlds for the web sites of TV shows and movies, such as this one for The Office.
These games are supposed to give media companies a way to take advantage of popular brands to grow their online presence, creating new places to sell anything from online ads to mugs -- and so far, they seem to be working very well. Current investors Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures have been impressed enough with the results to recently add $4 million on top of a $2 million previous investment.
To collect its information, Bunchball tracks things like the time you spend on the site, the buttons you click on, and the videos you watch in order to learn what you like. It uses those metrics to create what it describes as "rules" for different behaviors that a media company might want to encourage on a game.
Bunchball's game platform, Nitro, then matches up what it learns about user behavior on social networks with data from a media company's site -- the number of times a game is played, the number of posts to a forum, etc.
Next, it assigns the value of the action relative to the behavior it wants to promote. For example, if the game relies on earning points through interactions, as many do, Bunchball will assign different numbers of points for things like posting to forums or winning contests.
Once Bunchball has established the rules, it builds games around them that encourage competition, cooperation -- anything that will get users addicted.
A simple example of behavior manipulation through competition is adding a leaderboard to a game that displays rankings for winners. Other incentives and rewards might include points, levels, challenges and trophies.
Bunchball's The Office game-focused virtual world
The Office, hoping for 10,000 to 15,000 users. Instead, it gained more than 200,000, more than 80 percent of whom are active.
Check out this website for The Office, themed as "Dunder Mifflin," the fictional paper company featured in the show. Viewers sign up to become fictional Dunder Mifflin employees, based on "branch offices" -- their actual locations. Then they do things like make videos of themselves as employees to enter into contests for which branch has the best employees. The winners get virtual currency called "Scranton bucks" 0r Sb's that they can use to buy virtual goods, like the mug at the top of this article. The site uses a leaderboard to show who the top employees and branch offices are, which helps spur competition.
The Office, the show, is centered around interactions between co-workers at their desks. So NBC used Bunchball's "virtual room" module of its selection of game features to create virtual desks that users can put their virtual goods on -- a sort of way for users to mimmick their favorite characters.
For a more detailed walk-through, see the company's explanation here.
Bunchball's business model(s)
Bunchball makes money by getting paid for its game services and for advertising shows within social networks.
These large media companies can in turn advertise their games within shows, for example by making a character in a TV episode of The Office mention a contest. The games can then become new venues to sell advertising in. One company, Mastercard has run ads in the The Office site for its corporate account plan to reach office-oriented fans of the show. They also use the site to advertise swag for the show, like actual mugs (pictured).
Bunchball, the company
Bunchball itself is a typically scrappy widget company, having evolved from building Flash widgets within social networks to being this game-creator for other companies.
"We realized the big opportunity wasn't game content, but was meta-game experience," Bunchball's vice president of business development, Gene Mauro, told me when I ran into him at the MySpace developer's platform event, where he was scouting out MySpace's potential for its games.
The company has also gotten a lot of attention for building games that run across social networks, called Bunchball Games & Avatars. These games include a virtual currency and a single gamer identity that works across sites (see here for our coverage of this and other cross-network applications). Notably, Bunchball has also created another venue for advertising: Featuring its large clients within its social network games.
Bunchball is making this happen because it treats social networks like a giant petri dish, using them to both learn about and promote their creations. In fact, it uses what it learns through Nitro to make its own social networking games better, which Mauro says has contributed significantly to their growth on social networks.
For more background on how the Redwood City, Calif. company got started, read this column that Bunchball chief executive Rajat Paharia wrote for us last year.