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  3. On any given day 500 000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don’t start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet.

On any given day 500 000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don’t start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet.

admin2012-08-05  1
问题     On any given day 500 000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don’t start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. There are $20 "virtual" tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and faster-growing social game on the Internet.
    Social games are free online applications which is accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you’ve spent any time on either site you’re probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Cafe World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector’s most talked-about companies these days.
    Behind the buzz: Annual revenue at the two-year-old firm is likely to surpass $ 100 million this year, prompting speculation that the company backed by the likes of Linkedln cofounder Reid Hoffman and PayPal cofounder-turned-investor Peter Thiel—will soon go public. The software company also has managed to do something that other hot online brands such as Twitter and Facebook have not: Zynga has found a way to make social networking profitable.
    Zynga was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, who also started social networking site Tribe, net and software company SupportSoft, which eventually went public. While many of his Web 3. 0 peers rely on advertising and sponsorship for revenue, Pincus makes its money by getting gamers to buy virtual goods, like tractor fuel or land in the case of FarmVille, that enable players to build bigger farms at a faster rate.
    By developing games on social networks, Zynga is able to capitalize on the viral nature of the platform. (Zynga estimates it has 79 million monthy unique visitors.) Gamers can invite friends to join them in the game, and they can send updates on their progress to their friends, stoking (激起) interest. Once hooked, Pincus says, players spend real money on virtual goods to help them advance to higher levels—thereby enriching Zynga. And although playing requires only short spurts of time, the game never ends, as Zynga’s designers keep adding levels so that players come back for more.
    "For me it’s just relaxing and fun. I don’t have to think hard about it, and I can do it while watching TV," explains Lauren Kohn, 37, a mother of three in San Jose who has spent more than $ 100 on virtual goods since she started playing FarmVille four months ago.
    Pincus won’t reveal his margins, but he acknowledges that the company has been profitable every month since September 2007.
Due to the free online applications, social sites contribute to the growing popularity of______
选项
答案social games on the Internet
解析 信息明示题。由定位句可知，目前网络社交游戏盛行，而这些游戏都是在社交网站免费注册的。因此，社交网站的免费注册促进了网络社交游戏的流行。
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