We’ve outlined some facts below for additional clarification.

The Facts

1. When Facebook announced a more aggressive approach of enforcing their revised Advertising Guidelines, the team here at Gambit took immediate action to ensure our publisher partners on Facebook ran ads that complied with these guidelines. This included pulling thousands of international offers until we had had a chance to review each one individually. Gambit opened a direct channel of communication with Facebook and worked with Facebook employees to weed out all non-compliant offers.

2. While working through our ad inventory directly with Facebook, due to a technical bug, Gambit ended up showing a number of non-compliant offers to a segment of international traffic on the Facebook platform.  As soon as we noticed the bug, we took immediate action to fix it.  Unfortunately, while we were fixing the bug, Facebook sent our game development sister company, Kickflip, Inc., a cease and desist letter.  We understand that Facebook thought we were intentionally running the non-compliant ads which cannot be further from the truth.

3.    In any event, Kickflip, the company targeted by Facebook, does not own or operate Gambit.  Nor does Gambit have any relationship with Facebook, contractually or otherwise.  Gambit is an independent third-party payment and advertising platform for use by app developers, and Facebook cannot shutdown Gambit and its service any more than it can claim to shutdown Paypal or Google.  Moreover, it is our firm belief that Facebook cannot interfere with our publisher clients’ decision on which payments and advertising service provides them the best solution for their applications.

4. What social networking companies like Facebook can do is set guidelines on the types of advertising that can be run, and hold the publishers accountable.  Many of our clients already know that Gambit’s payments and advertising product provides the best solution to guarantee compliance with these guidelines.  While our competitors continue to run non-compliant ads, Gambit is delivering fully compliant advertisements to all of our publishers.  If we can’t deliver, we won’t be in business.

5. Gambit’s service remains completely uninterrupted for publishers and end users, and will remain both stable and compliant with whatever guidelines our publisher clients ask us to follow. Our publishers continue to run Gambit on their Facebook apps today.

6. Gambit continues to work diligently to ensure all ads we run through our clients’ applications on Facebook are compliant with the guidelines. Gambit continues to develop additional tools and educational materials to help our publishers make the best decisions about which monetization options they choose to run on their applications and games.

Q & A

Q: Why did you guys let non-compliant ads through?

A: When Facebook announced a new enforcement strategy for their Advertising Guidelines, Gambit took immediate action to sort and filter the ads we serve. However, ad inventory is vast and changing. Because of a technical error, we ended up serving some ads to non-U.S. traffic that were not in compliance with Facebook’s new guidelines. We did not do this intentionally, and we removed the ads as soon as we found out. We fixed the error, redoubled our efforts to filter out non-compliant ads, and are now serving only compliant ads.

Q: I’m a publisher in the Facebook platform and I use Gambit Payments. Am I at risk of being shut down?

A: No, absolutely not. Gambit Payments is running only compliant ads for developers running their applications on the Facebook platform, so the ads you publish in your app do not violate Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines and pose no risk.

Q: I’m using Gambit. Will my users still have access to payments and offers?

A: YES, your users still have access to payments and offers. Gambit Payments’ monetization services – including direct payments and compliant offers – are, and always have been, up and running without disruption.

Q: Are you guys still in business?

A: Thanks for asking. The answer is a resounding YES! We are definitely still in business and are challenging ourselves (and our competition) to be better than ever at product innovation. We still think the high-quality offers-based monetization of social applications is a fundamentally sound business model, but end user experience must be deeply integrated into the development process. We also think there are a lot more lot more innovation methods beyond traditional offers to monetize online communities on social networks and beyond, and we’re looking forward to rolling those out in the near future.

We hope this dispels some of the confusion and sensation surrounding Gambit’s business on Facebook, and we invite your questions at team@getgambit.com

Say hello to Gambit Tasks:

Hello, Gambit Tasks.

WHAT IT IS

Look for Gambit Tasks in the Offers Panel, alongside the traditional promo offers you already know so well. Like offers, users can earn virtual currency for your game without direct payment, making this a superb way to engage younger users, or international users in emerging markets.

Instead of completing surveys or signing up for promotions, users can now complete a set of quick, easy, but non-automatable tasks. These are tasks that are hard for software to master, but extremely easy for humans – especially social game-playing, Internet-savvy humans who are incentivized by the prospect of earning your virtual currency.

Here’s how it works:

1. A company that’s a Crowdflower client has thousands of online images that need to be checked for copyright issues
2. The company submits this set of tasks to CrowdFlower
3. CrowdFlower places the tasks in the Gambit payments platform, where it’s accessible to millions of users
4. A social game user wants to buy virtual goods in a game using Gambit, sees the offer to earn currency by doing a bit of work, and starts checking pictures for copyright issues
5. Once the user is done, the user is paid in virtual currency that can be used to buy goods back in the game.

Tasks would include:

• Tagging images or video clips with keywords to make them more searchable in a database
• Classifying text or other content under specific categories
• Reviewing content for copyright violations or other classifications

For those developers out there with lots of younger or international users who have more time than money, this represents a HUGE opportunity to increase your revenue. Yes, be excited.

WHY WE DID THIS

In our world, we’re always thinking through new ways to turn cash into virtual cash and then virtual cash back into cash for developers. So, when we got word of what the team over at CrowdFlower was up to — bringing big customers with simple tasks in connection with a massive online workforce who are more than happy to do a few tasks for cash, we started putting it all together.

Social gaming is exploding in popularity, and every day more people are buying virtual currency with real money, that they make from doing real work. Why couldn’t they just do the work and get their virtual currency right away?

Gambit Payment’s online payment system makes the earning opportunities CrowdFlower brings to the online workforce available in virtual economies for the first time in the history of social games.

The coolest part, we think, is that this gives all of our developer partners an excellent way to widen the transaction funnel.

Remember when we said that a user who has completed just 1 offer is 3 times more likely to transact again (often in direct payment)? With Gambit Tasks, the entrance to this transaction funnel is even wider because of how easy, accessible, and low-risk Tasks are.

The second coolest part is that your users can continue their in-game experience while earning virtual currency by doing game-like Tasks that are actually real work for real companies.

Crowdflower recognized that a partnership with Gambit would give them access to millions of capable users who were already among the web’s most fluent in web-based actions, and we recognized that the partnership would mean tons more engagement and revenue opportunity for developers.

We also like to try out new stuff. A lot. New stuff = exciting = reason for living.

We already know that this year’s revenue projections for the social game industry are tracking to surpass 1 billion dollars for developers on Facebook and MySpace, and we think Tasks is going to be a major enhancement to an already booming sector.

We’re really proud to be able to offer you guys product innovations like this, or even just feature improvements that you’ve requested, and we want to let you know to look for lots more stuff like this to come.

If you’re into this idea, have new ones for us, or just have questions, leave us your comments below.