Written by: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily
With the explosion of Notcoin, the TON ecosystem has emerged with a model of viral fission growth through Telegram invitations. This method has already had many examples in WeChat mini-program games, such as "Sheep Sheep", "Synthesize Watermelon" and "Cute Dog Transformation".
However, due to the restrictions on the version number, domestic games cannot adopt the direct payment model, and the most common monetization model is advertising monetization. In the Telegram ecosystem, there are no restrictions in various aspects, and the convenient link with the TON wallet provides a convenient channel for payment. After viral marketing, how do these TON ecosystem games realize commercial monetization for users?
Paid props
Taking the most popular click games as an example, the in-game tokens or points of such games are directly related to the number of clicks, and some click games have added TON for in-game bonuses, but the fees are not high. In TapSwap, users can pay 0.5 TON (worth about 3.5 US dollars) to permanently increase double points. If users believe that the game tokens of the project have high expectations and value in the end, buying Boost has become a must for long-term participants.
In addition to click-type games, there are also some projects with real gameplay. The underlying logic behind users' purchases of such games is not entirely based on the expectation of Crypto currency issuance, and some users are willing to pay for the game itself.
Take the most well-known Catizen as an example. The gameplay of this game is the same as the cute dog transformation game that became popular on WeChat many years ago. Users can breed pets of various levels, collect their output tokens, and then continue to breed higher-level pets. At that time, the cute dog transformation game could only be monetized through advertising, while Catizen has taken a different approach in the TON ecosystem.
First of all, Catizen has added a paid game item purchase module. Users can pay TON to obtain Fish tokens, which can accelerate the process of pet hatching in Catizen, and the marginal growth of investment cost is very fast. For the top users, they pay more for the game rather than for the game rewards. According to the official disclosure of Catizen, more than 50% of users have become paying users, and the conversion rate is already very high. In addition to paid props, Catizen plans to become a game Launchpool platform, which we will analyze later.
Startups for exchanges
Exchange Rebate Registration
While other games are still incentivizing users through invitation tasks, TapSwap was the first to join the Binance new account registration task, and its registration link was verified to come with an invitation code.
Telegram’s user base has exceeded 900 million, which still leaves a lot of room for development compared to Binance’s 200 million users. However, it is worth noting that the top five download regions for Telegram are India, Russia, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Most non-cryptocurrency and Binance-friendly countries have doubts about the achievable user growth.
Exchange product traffic
Pixelverse is a cultivation and combat game in which users will automatically obtain game tokens over time and then train their pets to fight.
Pixelverse added a task to cooperate with Bybit Web3 wallet in the Dashboard task list. Eight days after the launch, the number of participating addresses reached 700,000. Odaily queried the data of completed activities in the past. The last six activities lasted about 3-4 weeks, and the number of participating addresses was 320,000, 250,000, 580,000, 120,000, 70,000 and 80,000 respectively. It can be seen that the number of users that the TON ecosystem can capture is much higher than that of native Web3 projects, and it has obvious advantages in traffic growth.
Traffic Monetization
From the previous section, we can see that traffic growth is Telegram’s outstanding advantage, and projects that have built a large community can transfer their traffic to other projects and realize monetization through this channel.
Back to Catizen, the official has disclosed the next step of Launchpool and game platform development roadmap. Catizen has signed contracts with more than a dozen WeChat mini-games and plans to gradually launch these games on the Catizen game platform. From Gaming Bot to Game Launchpool, and then empower governance token holders.
There are also a wide range of projects that adopt this method, and the specific practice paths are also different. For example, the educational application XPLUS directly directs traffic to Catizen through the homepage advertising space, and the click game PocketFi allows the consumption of tokens of another application TON PUNKS to obtain click bonuses.
in conclusion
Dismantling the closed-loop logic of the TON ecological project according to the three links of user access, paid conversion, user retention and repurchase, it can be seen that relying on Telegram, the TON ecological project has natural and significant advantages in obtaining sufficient user visits.
However, in terms of user conversion, except for a few projects that are truly playable, there are not enough reasons for each project to attract users to pay other than the expectation of issuing coins, and homogeneity is extremely serious. It is even more difficult for non-head projects to convert paying users.
Therefore, the "success guru" or "shovel seller" has become the only way to close the loop of its business model, that is, to occupy a leading position and then sell traffic to other projects to gain revenue.
The current TON ecological project has initially demonstrated the feasibility of the free game fission + paid value-added approach, but how to truly leverage Telegram's unlimited dissemination capabilities, Crypto's highly compatible wallet expansion, and a huge base of 900 million users, we still have to wait for the next answer.
