The fast rise of the top social network site Facebook, has brought a rise in few social gaming sites like FarmVille, Birthday Cards, Cafe World, Texas HoldEm, Happy Aquarium, Mafia Wars, FishVille, Zoo World, PetVille, Pet Society and so on; resulting in a new vast development of online gaming industry.

Image via Anita Jamal

Most online social gaming sites or application games are free to play, often played by “online casual gamers” and loved by people of all ages, no matter kids, young people or old people.

But most people did not know that although they are not spending money on the gaming platforms or subscriptions to play these games, but sometimes they spend small amount of money in buying virtual goods to make them different from the rest in the games. So imagine that a games with a user base of more than hundreds million, then the little stuff amount will add up to very big amount!

In 2009, the largest social gaming company is Zynga. Zynga owns 6 of the top 10 Facebook games. In the same year, the top 3 social gaming companies according to revenue are Zynga $200,000,000, followed by Playfish $75,000,000 and Playdom $60,000,000.

How can Zynga earn so much money?
By selling virtual goods and virtual cashs to the social gamers.

FarmVille, a top social game in Facebook owned by Zynga is so popular that there are more virtual tractors sold in game every day than real tractors in America every year.

Since most virtual goods sales are through Paypal, therefore it is unbelivable that Zynga becomes the second largest Paypal mercant in the world after eBay!

However, Zynga spends $60-$96 million in Facebook Advertisement a year to drive new users to play its games.

Due to the high growing rate of social gaming users everyday, Zynga is predicted to earn $450 million in 2010. As you calculate, Zynga can earn over $1 million dollar per day by average. Wow, that’s a lot of money isn’t?

The infograpihic by OnlineSchools below will give you a clearer picture: