Former Freewebs Expanding Into Social Media

Web site hosting company Freewebs has changed its name to Webs.com, reflecting its expansion to encompass a group of social media properties.

In addition to Freewebs, the company will now include the Social Gaming Network (SGN), which develops games for online social networks, and pagii, a social publishing site aimed at teens.

The newly launched SGN builds game applications tailored to popular social networks. So far, it has created games only for Facebook including "Warbook," "Super Snake" and "Blocky." It has also recently added two recently acquired games, "Fight Club" and "Street Race." The idea is to leverage the viral nature of social sites to spur the adoption of games among potentially millions of users.

"We think this is a new category of gaming--layering games on top of social networks that utilize the social graph," said Freewebs CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada, referring to the online mapping of personal and professional relationships. The recently launched strategy game "Warbook," for instance, has already attracted 150,000 users daily on Facebook.

SGN is also focused on developing simpler casual games such as "Super Snake" and "Blocky," which are well-suited to social networks. "You're capturing people when they have some time to burn, after they check messages and have an extra 15 minutes or so, this just offers them something to do," Mokhtarzada said.

The casual games sector already generates $2.25 billion per year, according to the Casual Games Association, and is growing annually at a rate of 20 percent. SGN will compete to some degree with popular casual gaming sites including Electronic Arts' Pogo.com and Miniclip.

While concentrating for now on building SGN's audience, the company also plans to expand advertising geared toward the prized 18- to 24-year-old male gaming audience. It's already partnering with ad networks such as VideoEgg to run text ads in connection with games on Facebook, and is exploring other possibilities. Among them are sponsorships and product placement opportunities, such as allowing players to buy a can of Red Bull within a game so they can get a temporary boost while fighting their adversaries, Mokhtarzada said.

But he also emphasized that he doesn't want to go overboard trying to monetize games for fear of alienating users.

Mokhtarzada also doesn't expect the company to sell advertising across each of its properties because they target different audiences. Freewebs, which lets people build personal Web sites, is aimed primarily at women ages 30-45, whom he describes as "family decision makers." That audience has attracted more traditional marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Ford. The recently launched Pagii site, meanwhile, is mainly for girls ages 13-17--or the "Hannah Montana" crowd, in Mokhtarzada's shorthand.

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