More people are paying to play social games than they were a year ago, but the average player is also spending less than in the past.

According to SuperData, the average social gamer who pays to play in the U.S. spent $37.59 in April, which is about $8 less than a year ago, when the average social gamer spent $45.58.

SuperData partners with publishers and developers to create an online gaming panel, which tracks more than a million paying online gamers every month. The report covers the U.S., Germany, Brazil and Spain, spanning all major social game genres, including city building, farming, and strategy and combat.

While the amount each player pays has fallen, SuperData found that as the industry has matured, more people have become more comfortable spending money inside the free-to-play games. In April, 2.5 percent of social gamers converted to spending users, compared to 1.4 percent a year earlier.

But the average paying game player should not be confused with the overall average spend per user. After all, you can spend a lot of time harvesting crops and building cities without ever paying a dime.

For instance, in the first quarter, Zynga said the average bookings per user totaled 5.5 cents, which is the company’s total revenue for one quarter spread across all gamers — whether they pay or not.

SuperData found that game players who play mid-core games, which include strategy and combat games, are spending the most right now. Meanwhile, the average spending player of farming games has been on a decline for the past few months.

The research firm estimates that the North American social gaming market will be worth $1.8 billion by the end of this year, and the worldwide social gaming market, including social games on mobile, is expected to hit $13 billion in 2015.

One of the least-changed parts of AllThingsD since we started this site has been our “Voices” section, which has attracted robust and ever-increasing traffic over the years.

But today Voices gets a new look as we relaunch an updated section to bring you even more writing and information from outside sources. Voices will be run by senior editor Beth Callaghan, and will offer six regular features:

Must-Reads — formerly called Voices — will be the same daily compendium of links from around the Web. These are pieces we’ve selected editorially because we think they’re worth your time. We’ve made two changes in order to clarify the nature of the content and our role in suggesting them: We’ve renamed the links “Must-Reads From Other Web Sites” and we’ve simplified them to consist merely of outbound links. The links will appear in widgets across the site and in an archive — but when you click on a headline, you’ll be taken directly to the original Web site.

Voices is now made up of exclusive op-eds and posts from outside contributors who are well-versed in AllThingsD and have unique perspectives to share. We welcome and will evaluate all such pieces, and also plan to reach out to a range of industry experts on a variety of topics. Our goal is to spur debate and also give smart and engaging content a platform on our site.

Forum is conceived as an assembly of quick opinions from four or five well-known personalities on a single issue that is in the news. Topics can range from thoughts on the possible bubble in Silicon Valley to what’s the most interesting new trend to how possible privacy regulation will impact the tech industry. We hope to elicit a lot of different opinions and insights from a wide-ranging panel of execs, academics, venture capitalists, Wall Street analysts, entrepreneurs, bloggers and more.

Eye to Eye will be even more pointed, pitting a pair of often-opposing viewpoints on a controversial topic of the week — kind of like a Spy vs. Spy, but with words. The possibilities are endless here: Was $1 billion too much for Facebook to pay for photo-sharing site Instagram? Will Yahoo’s recent restructuring work? Do you think Google Glasses is a good idea? Where will Apple’s stock be in a year?

Numbers is a weekly story told by data — sometimes scientific, sometimes irreverent, always interesting. We will be working with many top research outfits, and will also be doing a number of our own polls of readers. We love infographics, surveys and pie charts at ATD and you’re going to get a whole lot of them.

Lastly, Ten Things About Me finds answers to entertaining and informative questions aimed at prominent people in the digital realm. It’s a little like the Proust Questionnaire mixed with the kind of queries that we are well known for at our D conferences, plus a whole lot of unusual ones, so you can get to know a variety of tech and media figures in a different way. First up: Twitter and Square inventor Jack Dorsey tells us what he’d be up to if he weren’t doing what he is doing now.

The new Voices will roll out all this week. Enjoy.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

It comes in the form of a survey of 100 CIOs by the investment bank J.P. Morgan. The firm finds that, on average, CIOs say they’re going to boost their IT spending by 2.7 percent this year, up from 2.4 percent in 2011. That may not seem like a big change, but here’s why its important: It’s the first time in a few years that the same survey has detected a directional change in sentiment. CIOs are at long last saying they intend to boost their spending on IT, rather than trimming it back and back and back as they have for the last several years. “In our prior CIO survey in September 2011, the directional movement indicated a reduction in planned spending growth, as at that time CIOs were starting to pare back on spending during more uncertain macroeconomic conditions,” the firm says in its report, which was shared exclusively with AllThingsD.

The optimism is a bit more pronounced when you see it expressed in the graphic below, which I grabbed from raw survey results. More than two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to boost their overall IT spend this year, most of them by a modest 1-5 percent, but some by more than 10 percent. Last year, the figure was 58 percent, but it usually swings up by only 3 or 4 percentage points, analyst Mark Moskowitz told me.

“The overall tone we got in our conversations with these CIOs was more optimistic than it has been in a while,” Moskowitz said. “They have the green light to start projects that are going to take several quarters to get done. Most aren’t willing to do that when they’re worried their overall business is going to roll over.” A lot of that has to do with more confidence in the overall macroeconomic environment.

And where will that growth be? And, perhaps more importantly, where won’t it be? Software, storage and security are looking like big spending priorities among the CIOs surveyed. Business intelligence tools and getting mobile devices integrated are also high on the list — there’s that ongoing trend toward “bring your own device” (BYOD), rearing its persistent head once again.

Employee-purchased iPhones, iPads and Android devices are supplanting company-assigned BlackBerrys. “BYOD is real,” Moskowitz says. “And you have to assume that Apple is going to be the one that benefits the most from it.”

Other winners include EMC and NetApp, as they play strongly in networked storage. Server virtualization — making one physical server act like dozens of servers, using software to subdivide its resources — also has a lot of room to grow, the survey finds. That’s good news for VMware.

Losers? There are few. Intel’s new Romley chip isn’t going to be as big a deal in spurring spending on new servers: In fact,91 percent of CIOs surveyed said they don’t expect Intel’s new chip to drive new spending in the data center. Intel’s last big upgrade, Nehalem, did change the game, Moskowitz says. The trouble is, most of the companies using Nehalem-generation chips in their servers are happy with them, and are unlikely to bother with the expense of an upgrade, for now.

Nor is Windows 8 going to cause a new round of PC buying, as both Hewlett-Packard and Dell are hoping. “A new version of Windows hasn’t caused a PC upgrade cycle since 1995,” Moskowitz told me. Asked directly if Windows 8 was expected to drive a major PC upgrade cycle, 78 percent of the CIOs in the survey said no. In fact, at least 30 of the CIOs in the survey said they were still working on deploying Windows 7. Ouch. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for things to be looking up for everyone all at once.

(Image is a movie poster for the 1935 British film starring Cicely Courtneidge, but the title song in this case is, well, awful. What I really wanted was an image of Fred Astaire dancing with Joan Fontaine to the underappreciated George and Ira Gershwin tune of the same name, from the 1937 film “A Damsel in Distress,” but I could find nothing suitable. So — loving Gershwin tunes as I do — just for fun, I’ve embedded both Astaire and Billie Holiday singing the tune, below, courtesy of Grooveshark. Yes, I’ll admit, sometimes I have a little too much fun in this job.)

That said, it is helpful to see that demand quantified, which is exactly what Baird Equity Research has done in its latest iPad survey. Among a group of 488 tech-savvy consumers between the ages of 18 and 34, Baird found that 24 percent of U.S. respondents planned to purchase the new iPad in the next three months. Among international respondents, that number rose to 29 percent. Interestingly, 42 percent of respondents (both U.S. and international) said the purchase would be their first tablet, while the remaining 48 percent said they already owned the iPad 2 or its predecessor.

A few more notable findings:

• 15 percent of U.S respondents and 22 percent of international ones said that they plan to purchase an iPad 2 at its newly discounted price.
• A quarter of the 59 Kindle Fire owners in the survey said they plan to purchase an iPad in the next three months. Says Baird, “We would note that the Kindle Fire was released in mid-November, marking a fairly quick turn-around.”
• Respondents who planned to purchase the 4G iPad favored Verizon and AT&T equally.
• The 16 gigabyte iPad was by far the most popular model among consumers Baird surveyed.

It turns out that people responding to our poll about whether they were buying an iPad 3 — which Apple is unveiling this coming week — are overwhelmingly planning to fork over the dough for a new one.

Nearly 70 percent of those who answered said they would be buying the latest iteration of the popular tablet device, while 17 percent said they were sticking with their old one.

Only 11 percent used a competing tablet — powered by Google Android or Amazon Kindle.

And about 4.5 percent of respondents said that they had not decided, but were looking forward to the last “Twilight” movie, now that Bella finally has her fangs as a newborn vampire with a newborn baby, too.

Thus, many want a bite of the latest Apple, but are definitely not Twihards.

Here’s the poll again, if you want to add your vote:

View This Poll

The share of U.S. adults who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between mid-December and early January, while the same growth spike also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10 percent to 19 percent over the same period. The driving force behind the surge in ownership, Pew said, was the relatively low cost of tablets like the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Barnes & Noble Nook tablet, as well as the price of some e-readers dropping below $100.

The new data comes after a period — from mid-2011 into the fall — in which there wasn’t a lot of change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers, Pew said.

We already had an inkling that the Amazon Kindle Fire sold very well in its first few weeks on the market; a Barclays analyst has estimated that Amazon sold 5.5 million Kindle Fire tablets last quarter, and predicts that Amazon will sell 18.4 million Kindle Fires this year, giving Amazon half of the non-iPad tablet market.

Also not entirely surprising: Households with higher incomes bought more tablets, while women’s ownership of e-readers increased more than men’s. More than a third of those living in households earning more than $75,000 — 36 percent — now own a tablet computer, Pew said. Ownership of e-readers among women grew more than among men, from 11 percent to 21 percent; compared to a 5 percent increase for men, with just 16 percent of them owning e-readers.

Anecdotally, those cheaper tablets still are harder to spot “out in the wild” than the iPad, as my AllThingsD colleague, Peter Kafka, notes here, whereas iPads seem to be popping up everywhere, from the airport to the gym. Personally, I know a handful of female adults who got either Kindle Fire tablets or less expensive Kindle e-readers this holiday season.

The Pew report comes from the combined results of two surveys — one conducted Jan. 5-8 among 1,000 adults age 18 and older; and another, conducted Jan. 12-15 of 1,008 adults, with a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points. The study is part of Pew’s research, supported by funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to look at how tablets and e-readers are impacting libraries.

(Photo courtesy of DJ Murdok/Flickr)

The stock fell $1.36, or roughly 6.6 percent, to $19.27 a share.

In November, the company’s stock priced at $20 a share and has been fairly consistent since, except for one major hiccup late last month when shares dropped as low as $15.

But it’s almost as if investors were looking for a reason to dump the stock — the survey released today by Susquehanna Financial Group and daily deal industry tracking firm Yipit was largely positive. It found that 80 percent of merchants said they enjoyed working with daily deals sites, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and others.

Some of the more negative points included concerns about the high level of discounts associated with featuring a daily deal and low repeat rates from consumers who purchased vouchers.

The response the market may have found the most alarming was how often merchants were comfortable running deals. The survey found that 52 percent of the merchants had no plans to feature deals in the next six months, and only 24 percent intend to offer one in the same time period.

But realistically, most small-to-medium-size merchants could not offer deals more often than once a year, given that it typically takes that long for vouchers to expire. Most customers redeem the coupons over several months.

The survey polled nearly 400 merchants that had run daily deals in the past with companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial, but only 100 responded to the questions.

It’s not clear if Netflix’s recent series of snafus are Amazon’s gain or not. But in a just-released report by ForeSee, one went up and one went down.

It’s an easy guess which was which.

In the well-known customer satisfaction survey of the Top 40 online retailers during the holiday season — which ForeSee has been conducting twice a year for the last seven years — Amazon rose to its highest spot ever, while Netflix’s score dropped significantly.

Amazon got an 88 out of 100, up two points, while Netflix dropped seven points to 79. The survey noted that “Netflix saw scores drop in every single element of the website that ForeSee measures, including site content, site functionality, merchandise, and prices.”

Ooops.

(Netflix fared better with customers in another poll last week, conducted by Citigroup. As Peter Kafka noted: “They’re less happy than they used to be. But they don’t seem to be going anywhere.”)

But in the ForeSee survey, Netflix moved from being a consumer darling to just another face in the crowd. It garnered the average score, which is also 79, a number that has risen from 74 since 2005.

But Netflix was not the only online retailer hit. Also down: Gap.com (down 6 percent to 73), and Overstock.com (down 5 percent to 72).

But on the up: TigerDirect.com (up 8 percent to 79) and J.C. Penney (up 6 percent to 83).

In general, ForeSee concluded that consumers are starting to get the hang of this e-commerce thing, and have become less price-sensitive, too.

And here’s a pretty chart explaining it all (click on the image to make it larger):

In a post last week about what could be in a Facebook smartphone — one in a series about the mobile efforts at the social networking giant — AllThingsD.com asked readers if they wanted one or not (we also offered a “maybe” option, as you can see below).

And, after almost 1,500 responses so far, it seems most people had no interest in such a device from Facebook, with almost 81 percent giving it the nix.

Slightly less than 8 percent wanted one, with 12 percent saying that they would possibly consider it.

Apparently, Google Android and Apple iPhone have little to be worried about, for now.

View This Poll

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

A new survey conducted by ChangeWave and RBC Capital Markets found that five percent of 2,600 respondents had either already preordered or were “very likely” to buy the Fire, exceeding the four percent who said in 2010 that they were very likely to buy the iPad. Another 12 percent said they were “somewhat likely” to purchase the Fire, again surpassing the nine percent who said the same thing of the original iPad prior to its launch.

And of the five percent of “very likely” buyers, 26 percent said they would delay their iPad purchase to buy the Fire.

If those metrics are surprising, they really shouldn’t be. The Fire’s low price, relative to the iPad, is obviously a major attraction — $199 to the iPad’s $499. And — thanks to the iPad — consumers are now familiar enough with the tablet category to be comfortable dropping $199 on the Fire.

That said, the pent-up Kindle Fire demand on display in this survey suggests that Apple may finally have a true tablet rival with which to battle, as RBC analyst Mike Abramsky observes:

“Tablet contenders (Xoom, Galaxy Tab, PlayBook, etc.) have failed to gain appreciable traction against iPad’s estimated 67 percent share, and iPad 2 should be a popular holiday purchase,” he writes. “However, strong early Fire uptake seems likely, raising speculation Apple now faces a real tablet contender.”

Yahoo — which has been trying to right itself after a series of missteps and an ever-weakening business — took another direct hit yesterday, as it got dinged in a high-profile annual survey of the Top 100 global brands.

According to Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands 2011,” Yahoo dropped 11 percent in brand value — calculated as $4.4 billion — in the year in which it fell from No. 66 to No. 76.

Way to go, Yahoo marketing! I think that pricey “It’s You” advertising campaign might not have worked.

Meanwhile, Apple broke into the Top 10 list for the first time, vaulting from No. 17 to No. 8, rising 58 percent in brand value to $33.5 billion.

Other tech companies did pretty well in the Interbrand poll — which is the gold standard of the state of brand health with consumers — especially compared to Yahoo (whose brand value high was in 2007 and which is now back at 2001 levels).

For example: IBM kept its No. 2 spot, with brand value rising eight percent; Microsoft fell three percent, but maintained its No. 3 place; Google stayed at No. 4, up 27 percent; and Amazon rose 32 percent and reached No. 26 from No. 36.

Even troubled companies prevailed over Yahoo’s twin declines: Hewlett-Packard held on to its No. 10 slot, with brand value up six percent; Research In Motion dropped only five percent and two slots, from No. 54 to No. 56; and Nokia fell from No. 8 to No. 14 and saw its brand value decline 15 percent.

Most interesting, perhaps, about the 12-year-old survey: Six of the Top 10 brands are tech companies.

So says a new Citigroup survey of 1,800 consumers in the U.S., the U.K. and China. The research offers lots of interesting data points about tablet adoption in general (summary: Still an iPad market, not a tablet market) and we might come back to some of those later on. For now, a few things that will interest people who pay attention to the media business.

For instance:

All tablet users use apps (of course), but iPad owners are much more likely to pay. Citi says 81 percent of iPad owners report that they’ve paid for an app, while only 43 percent of the users of “other” tablets (read: Android) have done so.

But all tablet owners are still most interested in free stuff:

People who plan on buying a tablet are most likely to do so because they think it’s a cool toy. That’s even more true now than it was last year.

And people who have bought a tablet don’t end up doing much work on it, unless Web surfing and email count as work (which, admittedly, could be the case):

And while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says the iPad isn’t a big deal for his users, they seem to disagree — nearly a third of them use the service on their device.

The results are in for AllThingsD’s survey of readers to determine the best (and snarkiest) moniker for the $12.5 billion Google bid for Motorola Mobility.

And the winner, by a huge amount, is Googorola, with 53.2 percent of more than 1,000 votes, with second place going to ScrewYouApple at 14.9 percent.

It was followed by: GooMo (6.7 percent); Gotorola (5.8 percent); MoGoo (4.9 percent); Motoroogle (4.6 percent); Motoogle (four percent); Moola (2.8 percent); YouTooMicrosoft (1.1 percent); MaBell (0.8 percent); AlsoNokia (0.6 percent); and NotSoMuchHP (0.6 percent).

Here’s a colorful chart to peruse:

One of my favorite things about any giant mess o’ acquisition is the opportunity to give it a really snarky nickname.

And this $12.5 billion Google bid for Motorola is just about the perfect storm for a new coinage.

So please take this survey early and often:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

According to a new survey by Experian’s PriceGrabber division, 35 percent of consumers plan to purchase the next iteration of the iPhone upon its release. Of those, 51 percent said they’ll buy the iPhone 5 within the first year of release; 30 percent said they will purchase it before the end of 2011; 14 percent plan to buy it within the first month; and seven percent within the first week.

Driving that purchasing intent: The iPhone 5′s rumored new features, specifically improved battery life, a larger screen, 4G network compatibility and an improved camera. Of the 2,852 U.S. respondents surveyed, 55 percent also hoped for a price reduction.

“Our survey data confirms the strong following Apple has built around its iPhone, with more than one-third of consumers planning to upgrade to the latest model only a little over a year following the release of the iPhone 4,” PriceGrabber general manager Graham Jones explained. “Anticipation and brand loyalty are certainly high, but in today’s 24-7 work culture and uncertain economic environment, consumers are cautious to look for a reasonably priced phone that will perform optimally over an extended time period.”

But many of those same companies tend be much more optimistic about smartphones: The platforms seem manageable and finite, and consumers seem willing to pay for stuff on an iPhone or Android that they’d never shell out for on their laptops.

I think that conventional wisdom is overblown — more wishful than realistic. Still, it’s the conventional wisdom among many media executives I talk to.

Here’s a nice illustration of that, via a new Accenture survey. The consulting firm asked “130 leaders and decision-makers in the Media and Entertainment industry” about their digital content plans, and found a pretty strong consensus — they think consumers and dollars are going to flock to mobile in the next couple years.

What about the iPad and any other tablets? We’ll assume that the big media guys are including tablets in the “mobile/wireless” answer in the second poll question. But note that they’re clearly less enthusiastic about tablets, compared to phones, in the first question.

Accenture notes that if you carve up responses by industry, things change a bit. For instance, publishers who embraced the iPad (and the Kindle, and the Nook) from the get-go think that tablets will be the favorite device for 36 percent of their customers in the near future.

Groupon’s S-1 filing for an IPO last month certainly got a lot of ink.

Unfortunately, much of it was negative, focused on several controversial parts of the document. Most scrutinized were large slugs of money taken out of the social buying site by its founders, as well as aggressive accounting terminology to make large losses look less, well, large.

Rattled by the intense media and analyst reaction to the filing, sources said the Chicago-based company commissioned a poll of its consumers and merchants to gauge the impact.

One source familiar with the survey said that top execs and its board wanted concrete reaction from key constituencies, instead of relying on “noise from the echo chamber” of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

And, said several people who had seen the poll, it should probably come as no surprise that the impact of the drumbeat of Groupon-is-doomed news on merchants and consumers was low, with only one percent saying that they had formed a negative opinion of the company from the filing.

That, of course, does not mean that those important groups for Groupon aren’t disgruntled about a whole laundry list of other issues.

But — for now, at least — an S-1 with some warts isn’t one of them.

Whatever the case, Groupon will continue to face scrutiny as it moves to amend the filing after comments from government regulators, and also when it reports its latest financial results soon for the three months ended June 30, 2011.

And those are numbers that everyone will surely be paying attention to.

Sort of true, says Nielsen.

Nielsen’s latest survey of “connected device” owners–basically, people who own smartphones and iPads–shows that they’re willing to shell out money for movies, music, magazines, etc. Sometimes. If the price is right.

Essentially, Nielsen finds the price point sweet spot is $9.99 a month or less for monthly subscription services. Except when it’s not: For news, streaming radio and sports services, most people say they won’t pay anything at all.

Here’s the question Nielsen asked device owners: “For each of the media content types that you could potentially access through your connected devices, please indicate how much you would be willing to pay for a monthly subscription to access it.”

And here are the results (click the image to enlarge):

Caveats: Again, this is what people say they’re willing to pay, not what they’re actually paying for–it’s poll data, not sales data.

And because it’s about subscription services, much of this is theoretical, anyway–most of the content people are getting on their phones and tablets comes via free apps, or those paid for with a one-time purchase.

But we should be getting real world data we can match up against this survey data soon: Apple has started to roll out its subscription services via iTunes (next month is a crucial deadline for content owners who want to distribute subscription services on iOS) and Google’s Android is headed that way, too.

A survey found that although independent developers make far less money than salaried employees, they felt the industry was more innovative than ever, calling 2010 “the year of the indie.”

Electronic Arts echoed those sentiments yesterday after it announced that it had acquired Firemint, a 60-employee game studio in Australia known for its blockbuster iPhone hit Flight Control.

EA Interactive’s EVP and GM Barry Cottle said the videogame industry will continue to see a flurry of smaller mobile and social acquisitions as larger studios see the value in picking up small, creative teams of developers. “We are always on the lookout.”

The survey’s results and EA’s perspective contradict what Nintendo said earlier this year during its keynote at GDC, the annual game developers conference. Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata warned that there will be consequences to developing free or very low cost titles.

“The majority of people here are creating games for social and mobile. I fear our business is dividing, and that threatens the employment for those of us who make games for a living,” he said.

If Satoru was addressing the indie developers in the crowd, it’s true that they make less money. However, it’s also these developers who are the most optimistic–and represent potential acquisitions for more established game makers.

With the rise of open platforms, like social networks and mobile, developers can make original games on very small budgets that can reach millions of consumers through these channels. Likewise, new business models that allow consumers to play games for free have spurred adoption among those who were never willing to invest in an Xbox, Wii or PlayStation.

Game Developer magazine, which released results of its 10th annual salary survey, found that salaries of all types of developers increased over the year-ago period.

Developers working on console, emerging social and online titles saw a 7 percent salary increase in 2010 over 2009, reaching $80,817. Meanwhile, independent contractors earned an average of $55,493.

At the bottom of the ladder were self-identified “independents,” trailing with a $26,780 average. However, those indies also saw a nice salary boost, earning some $6,000 more compared to the year earlier.

Furthermore, the study said that while salaried game developers earned vastly greater average income, they had a bleaker outlook on the industry. Anecdotally, the survey’s respondents said that working in the traditional structure is “frustrating,” lamenting that larger studios are “trimming talent” and crunching harder.

Photo Credit: Roberta W.B.

SurveyMonkey, the quiet but profitable and fast-growing Web survey company, is buying online forms start-up Wufoo.

While the terms of the transaction for the Tampa, Fla.-based Infinity Box–makers of Wufoo–were not disclosed, sources said the price was $35 million in cash and stock.

Besides bringing together two delightfully kooky start-up names, the acquisition gives the Palo Alto, Calif.-based SurveyMonkey another tool to expand its offerings.

The Silicon Valley company’s most recent purchase was telephone-polling firm Precision Polling. And, in January, it acquired a minority stake in ClickTools, a U.K.-based survey provider on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Here’s the official press release:

SURVEYMONKEY ACQUIRES WUFOO

Leader in online surveys adds leader in online forms to expand services for customers

Palo Alto, Calif. and Tampa, Fla., April 25, 2011– SurveyMonkey, the leader in Web-based survey solutions, today announced the acquisition of Infinity Box Inc., the makers of Wufoo, a web application to create online forms. As part of the transaction, the entire Wufoo team will relocate to Palo Alto to join the combined company and help fuel SurveyMonkey’s continuing growth. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Wufoo was created in 2006 to provide an easy and efficient process for creating online forms, one of the most essential and commonly used interfaces for collecting data on the web. The application’s HTML form builder automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to collect and understand data so users can create surveys, contact forms, registrations and other forms without writing code. In addition, customers frequently use Wufoo’s forms to process online transactions. With Wufoo, a process that previously required hours of work by web developers can now be done by anyone with web access in a matter of minutes.

“Wufoo is the market leader in online form creation and a perfect fit for SurveyMonkey,” said Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey CEO. “From the product and business model, to the team and culture, we are absolutely delighted to welcome the company into the SurveyMonkey family and look forward to increasing the reach and scale of an already outstanding product through our platform.”

“Everyone at Wufoo is very excited about joining the SurveyMonkey team, and the expansion opportunities for our business that will result from this combination,” said Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale. “By leveraging SurveyMonkey’s international resources, knowledge scaling infrastructure and expertise with large data collection systems, we will be able to increase the scope, performance and reliability of Wufoo’s services.”

The acquisition will allow SurveyMonkey to offer online forms, in addition to surveys, to collect users’ insights and data. Over the past two years SurveyMonkey has continued to enhance services by actively evaluating opportunities to partner and invest in complementary businesses. In January, SurveyMonkey announced it had formed a strategic partnership with ClickTools, a leading survey provider on salesforce.com’s AppExchange. In 2010, SurveyMonkey successfully completed a $100 million debt financing and also acquired telephone-based survey company Precision Polling.

Apparently, it’s not only in Google’s pond where Facebook fishes for talent–the social networking giant has recruited Microsoft’s global advertising head Carolyn Everson as one of its top sales execs.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the hiring, after a query this afternoon by BoomTown. Everson will be VP of Global Sales at the Silicon Valley company, although is likely to be located in New York.

The move will surely cause some tensions with the software giant, which is both a prominent partner of and investor in Facebook, especially since Everson was only hired at Microsoft last June after a long search.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg addressed that issue in a statement:

“Microsoft was one of our earliest partners and is still one of our most valued. We have a long and strong relationship that includes search ads on our site, a social layer on Bing search results and a deep and popular integration with Xbox. They are a leader when it comes to unlocking the power of social for their already popular products and services. We look forward to continuing to expand our relationship with them.”

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

Despite the possible awkwardness between Facebook and Microsoft–hey, we stole your top sales exec, but you rock!–the move to Facebook is a big opportunity for Everson.

But, according to sources, the former MTV Networks ad exec had become frustrated by the intense focus on pushing traffic to Microsoft’s Bing search service from its MSN portal at the expense of premium ad sales.

In addition, with the massive search and advertising partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo now in place, Everson was also not able to offer search advertising from Microsoft to marketers in packages. Yahoo is now in charge of that offering.

Everson will essentially be replacing longtime and well-regarded Facebook ad exec Mike Murphy, who left the Palo Alto, Calif., company last fall. She will report to former Googler David Fischer, VP of Advertising and Global Operations.

But it was COO Sheryl Sandberg, said sources, who was most focused on Everson. In fact, she just “friended” Everson on Facebook this week, as did another top ad exec, Tom Arrix.

Having a top exec who is amenable to and well known by Madison Avenue is key for Facebook as it ramps up its business, in anticipation of an IPO next year.

Despite being private, Facebook has recently been valued at between $50 and $60 billion by investors, who have been eagerly buying up shares of the company on secondary markets.

Under Murphy and Fischer, ad sales have been doing well already. Facebook’s share of online display advertising has more than quadrupled, from about three percent to almost 14 percent of the nearly $9 billion U.S. market, according to a recent survey.

In growing so quickly, Facebook has grabbed ad revenue–reportedly $2 billion last year–from old online powerhouses, especially Yahoo and AOL, and is also in a big fight with Google over premium ad sales.

Facebook’s surging usage and engagement are the reasons for the increased interest from advertisers, as well as its global growth in both market share and mindshare of consumers.

Thus, the search for a Murphy replacement was far-ranging, and included interest in a number of prominent ad execs from traditional media giants and also ad agencies.

The appointment is a big move for the dynamic Everson, who has mostly worked in the mainstream media for much of her career.

Everson came to Microsoft from a job as EVP of Strategy and Operations for the MTV Networks U.S. ad sales department.

Interestingly, she was also on the short list of candidates Yahoo was once perusing to fill the key U.S. ad sales job after Joanne Bradford departed for Demand Media.