Today, 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.