Facebook’s new addiction

Although I have had a facebook account for about 5 years now, I have not always been an “addict,” you know the guy always checking for new updates, writing a status about what I ate for dinner, or constantly hitting up my friends on FB chat. However once I got to college that started to change, not because I suddenly became more interested in the common features previously mention but I quickly found a new obsession that led me to login multiple times a day: flash games! These have started to consume my free time in ridiculous amounts. When I get onto the internet and have done my normal browsing around, I nearly always turn to the (I will admit it) stupid games. From family feud to farmville to data worm, these game have brought a new part of facebook to me that is all to addictive.

One of the main reasons I find these to be so enslaving is the competitiveness of always having the highest score of your friends. I will play for longer than I should, get the top score, take a while off thinking I am done with that game altogether, until a message pops up that my record has been broken….then sadly the cycle starts back over again.

Here is why this is good business, before every time you start a new game a 30 second advertisement pops up, something that you always dread seeing but of course am willing to wait it out to play again. While facebook does not have a whole lot of advertisements that  people often pay attention to, the games section is an exception. Also in some of the “story games” where you try and accumulate items over time they offer for you to buy (with real money) credits that get you new attributes that are not available without your credit card. Although I have not fell this deep in my obsessiveness, clearly others have. Facebook has now made over $350 million through these games.

Although a nontraditional revenue maker that most I am sure do not realize, facebook’s games are a profitable business creation.