Sweet Seeds: Zynga Has Raised Over $1 Million For School Children In Haiti

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Friday, January 8th, 2010

farmville_freak_sweet_seeds_for_haitiToday, backstage at the Crunchies, Zynga’s Mark Pincus revealed a pretty impressive number the Zynga.org wing of the social gaming company, Zynga: They’ve raised over $1 million dollars just from virtual goods for school children in Haiti.

Anyway you slice it, it’s a pretty impressive number. But it’s even more impressive when you consider that this million dollars came just from the sale of one virtual good within Farmville: Sweet seeds. Zynga has sold over $2 million worth of these seeds (back in October, the number was just over $800,000) with a full 50% of the sales going to the charity. Pincus tells us that they decided on the 50% number because they wanted people to realize they were serious about giving money to a charity while at the same time keeping this a meaningful business.

And it’s a model that works because these sweet seeds have value for the users in Farmville as well. In fact, Pincus envisions a future where this type of charitable virtual good market is worth a billion dollars. And to get there, he actually hopes his competitors use the idea as well.

Watch more in the video below. We apologize for the blurriness. It happens.

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