Angry Birds Create Business Change

Those Angry Birds are back, but they aren’t so angry any more. See what a few gazillion dollars and a business change model will do for a guy?

As of about a week ago, Angry Birds had been downloaded fifty million times. All by itself that’s an amazing number, and forget about the fact that Angry Birds sells for all of one dollar on iPhone and is free on Android smartphones. Fifty million people playing your game? Nice.

As I pointed out a couple of months ago, the folks who own Angry Birds have something on their minds way bigger than trying to make a living a dollar at a time. Sure, Angry Birds is an amazing advertising revenue play (seriously, Mr. Murdoch . . . ), but the real money is in getting us to buy extra stuff directly from the Angry Birds.

Seriously: while Angry Birds won’t exactly become the next Amazon.com, the idea is the same; not matter what it is you need that’s related to Angry Birds, the game’s maker Rovio wants to have its hand in your pocket for the transaction. Sell you stuff that works better in the Angry Birds game? Sure. Peddle you a “remove all those advertisements” option? You bet. Sell just about anything? Why not?

Better still, you aren’t going to have to dig out your credit card to buy things inside Angry Birds; payment will just get tacked onto your phone bill.

OK, so that’s better for Rovio, and only better for you if you like the idea (and worse if your kids start buying things you didn’t want them to). But wow. It sure is business change!

And you thought games were just for kids.

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