Zynga has announced that they have formed a partnership with Yahoo to feature its games throughout Yahoo’s network which has over 600 million users.
Neither company has not announced which of the Zynga games will be in Yahoo’s gaming network, but one would think that the most popular game Zynga has, Farmville will be there. This will not rollout for a few months, and when it does, it will only be rolled out to the US at first, with a global rollout later on.
Yahoo says that games and/or updates will be available through many of its services, including the Yahoo Games portal, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger.
Exiting Yahoo! user identities are available through the Social APIs and also through YAP. This makes it easier for Zynga games to gain instantaneous growth, because existing Yahoo members do not need to sign up or remember another login/password.Yahoo’s new infrastructure
Here is part of a post in the Yahoo Developer Blog:
“Both the Social APIs and YAP will also allow them to easily tap into Yahoo! user identities (including the aggregated identities we’re enabling across our network), share to Yahoo! Updates, and automatically leverage these new notification channels. (We’ll be providing more details on these new notification channels soon – and they, like so many of our products, will be open for all.)
Yahoo’s new infrastructure provides the entryway to the games from all Yahoo’s properties.
Again, from the Yahoo Developer blog: “With these integrations, users who enjoy Zynga games will now have the ability to use their Yahoo! ID and access Zynga’s top titles across Yahoo!’s many products – including Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Toolbar, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Profiles, and Yahoo! Messenger. YDN is proud to provide the infrastructure enabling these experiences to seamlessly plug into these products.”
Zynga is becoming bigger and bigger. They formed a partnership with 7-Eleven which starts June 1st, and now they have announced this partnership with Yahoo. It will be interesting to look at the growth of users for Zynga at the end of the fiscal year.