Facebook Isn’t Sharing Ad Revenue With Zynga, But Could in the Future

Zynga updated its public filing yesterday, disclosing some of the terms of its agreement with Facebook.

The document, which was heavily blacked out due to confidentiality statements, suggested that Facebook was sharing a share of revenues from advertising with the largest game developer on its platform. But Facebook made a statement today which makes it clear that this is not the case.

Facebook told me today it does not share revenue with Zynga from ads that appear on its own social network, but in the future, it could share revenue from advertising if they appear on one of Zynga’s properties and were sold by Facebook.

In a statement, a spokesperson explained, “We don’t have agreements with any developers, including Zynga, to share revenue from ads next to their Facebook canvas apps. We did agree with Zynga to work together in the future on providing ads on their properties beyond Facebook, but we have no current timeline for when we might start working on that.”

In other words, if Zynga launched its own game center, or site, where visitors come to play games, Facebook may sell the ads for that network and share a portion of the proceeds with Zynga. The language in the contract is not clear on whether or not this is an exclusive arrangement.

Despite the advertising partnership, Facebook is not working on an ad network right now.

This clarification should be of some relief to game developers, who thought Zynga has some unfair advantage.

In addition to ad revenues, Zynga’s 600-page document filed yesterday, disclosed an investment from Google and many other details of its five-year partnership with Facebook.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald