FarmVille’s growth in new users has at last netted it a significant number of new daily active users (DAU), pushing it back over the 30 million amark and doubling the total DAU of the next-closest app, Facebook for iPhone. The Zynga game leads this week’s AppData list of top gainers on Facebook by DAU.

Besides FarmVille, the list this week is occupied by a number of newer games, some of which we’ll talk about over on Inside Social Gaming. We’ve also registered a definitive gain for Slide FunSpace, which picked up over a half-million new DAU:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	30,806,872	+2,103,410	+6.83
2.	Social City	1,239,331	+1,239,240	+99.99
3.	Slide FunSpace	1,791,231	+636,786	+35.55
4.	Static FBML	5,745,491	+467,665	+8.14
5.	Restaurant City	3,670,846	+358,434	+9.76
6.	Birthday Album	367,764	+350,046	+95.18
7.	Pet Society	4,304,155	+310,402	+7.21
8.	Farmville exclusive	288,097	+287,258	+99.71
9.	Bubble Island	504,192	+259,995	+51.57
10.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	511,414	+234,448	+45.84
11.	iHeart	1,869,150	+203,801	+10.90
12.	Mobile	7,099,193	+198,300	+2.79
13.	YoVille	2,132,214	+191,937	+9.00
14.	Tiki Resort	427,563	+178,463	+41.74
15.	Jeux Gratuits	166,892	+165,108	+98.93
16.	Happy Aquarium	4,693,053	+155,957	+3.32
17.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,305,568	+128,394	+2.04
18.	Zoo Paradise	122,571	+117,895	+96.19
19.	Tarjetitas	220,909	+116,784	+52.87
20.	Blingee Book	218,873	+106,603	+48.71

FunSpace recently shot from about 4.5 million to more than 25 million monthly active users (MAU), the apparent result of a new strategy by Slide. But the media sharing app’s DAU has lagged behind.

Even now, it’s not entirely clear whether all 1.79 million of Slide’s daily users are indeed coming on a regular basis, or if the continuing growth in new users is padding the numbers slightly.

Static FBML, the Facebook-built app for customizing Pages, has fallen to number four from its last-week gain of four million DAU. Following it, after EA’s Restaurant City, is Birthday Album, an app from the fairly new developer 2pad. It’s the dev’s second attempt after Photo Books, a photo printing app that has gained plenty of MAU but almost no daily users.

Farmville exclusive is doing well, but probably not for long; it’s just the latest parasite to pop up around FarmVille. And rounding out the top 10, there’s Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]. This app, by a dev listed as aa, is a friend quiz. We expect several of these to do well in coming weeks, following the banning of Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ, which had 30 million MAU combined.

The number of big social applications that use Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, continues to rise. The latest is Zynga’s smash hit farming game, FarmVille, the largest application on Facebook with nearly 84 million users a month.

The integration is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the screenshot below. Credits is shown as the first of several payment options — others include direct credit card payments, PayPal, and a variety of other payment services, including prepaid cards and offers.

Zynga has previously been running Credits in some of its smaller Facebook apps, like role-playing game Pirates: Rule the Caribbean. Credits is now also appearing on some of its other big applications, like pet-caring title PetVille. However, it’s not on others, including Café World.

However, Zynga, like Playfish, Playdom and most other social gaming companies on Facebook, is not running Credits exclusively. But another big developer is: CrowdStar.

Clearly, many developers are reluctant to make Credits the exclusive way that companies monetize through virtual goods on Facebook. Facebook takes a 30% cut of all transactions on Credits, whereas third party payments companies typically take far less. Credits could play a meaningful role in Facebook’s revenue growth over the coming quarter – we recently reported that Facebook revenues were $600-$700 million in 2009, and could hit $1.1 billion in 2010.

However, the more users who use Credits, the more it will become the de facto way that they buy virtual currency on the site — which could bring in a lot more money for Facebook. The company is going out of its way to promote this, doing things like featuring games that use Credits within its suggested games list within its Games Dashboard. Fine-tuning apps to include Credits may also make the currency more valuable. CrowdStar’s Peter Relan has previously told us that “once you get over the hump, it’s great, and just as profitable.”

Also, rumors have circulated for months suggesting that Facebook wants to somehow make Credits the only virtual currency available on the site, but we have not been able to confirm anything along these lines.

While Facebook has been widely testing it with app developers since last year, we expect to see new announcements coming about it relatively soon. The company is potentially planning to launch a couple other big initiatives at its f8 developer conference in April, including location services and the  “Open Graph” API. It’s possible that Facebook will use the event to further promote Credits — moving it from a now-huge closed beta test to an open one, for example.

Note: The future of payments in Facebook apps and social games will be a central topic at our upcoming Inside Social Apps 2010 conference on April 20th, the day before f8, in San Francisco. For more details, click here.

Since the new Facebook home page launched a few weeks ago – making a few application bookmarks more prominent on the home page – one of the usability issues with the new design is that it’s been difficult for users to reorder bookmarks on their home page. Instead of allowing reordering, Facebook has only allowed bookmark deleting directly from the home page, making it harder for developers to tell users how to make their bookmark more prominent.

Now, Facebook says on its Developer Wiki that it is “actively building” bookmark reordering for the home page with an estimated launch date of “March.” We’ll let you know when Facebook rolls it out, as many developers will likely want to encourage users to move their app bookmarks up, directly under the Applications and Games dashboard links on the home page.

Facebook is going to launch its location-based features “next month,” according to a report today from the New York Times — a confirmation of many months of rumors that we and other publications have been hearing. Sources close to the company shared specific knowledge of the tightly-wrapped project, including a clear message for developers: Get ready for location at f8, Facebook’s developer conference.

That’s where the new service will be unveiled, according to the report. Facebook will launch a way for users to check in at physical locations and share the information back with their friends on the site (possibly by attaching location data to status updates, for example). Crucially, there will also be a set of APIs so developers can access Facebook’s location service in their own applications.

Developer Impact

But certainly, by providing a location-based service itself, Facebook is making it harder for smaller companies to differentiate themselves through location alone. Foursquare, Gowalla and increasing number of other startups have been building services where users win “badges” or other virtual goods if they use their phones to “check in” at a physical place more regularly than other users. Given the details of Facebook’s plan, it seems the company wants to funnel consumer interest in these types of location-based games through its platform.

Facebook’s social graph likely reflects who many people would want to share their locations with, and for this reason some startups, including Foursquare, Gowalla and the FriendSpin iPhone app, among others, already offer ways to share locations with Facebook  friends — although the effort hasn’t converted to lots of users, that we’ve seen.

The promise is that Facebook’s own service would make location more popular, and so any company that relied on Facebook’s service might somehow ride that wave. On a related note, while Facebook may not be trying to build a location-based game, but game developers and other application companies on its platform could use the features to more directly compete with existing startups. For more, check out our panel on monetizing mobile social applications, happening at our Inside Social Apps conference a day before f8.

Location’s Long Time Coming

Facebook has been looking at location for a long time. But it has delayed launching the service, as many have previously heard, because the company has been concerned about privacy issues. It was also waiting for the concept to become somewhat popularized before launching anything, according to today’s report, something that is not yet clearly happening. But big web rivals have been testing their own location services, and startups are getting in to the fray.

As we covered last fall, the company updated its terms of service to reflect its interest in location:

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

More recently, it has been rumored to be looking at acquiring location-based social network Loopt. And VentureBeat today notes, as we’ve heard, that Facebook has been working on a variety of location-related projects internally recently.

Given the lineup of location-based services launching at South by Southwest, a popular media and technology culture conference starting in Austin next week, we expect location — as a concept — to get even more buzz this spring than it has already. In fact, Facebook’s design team will have a location-related presence there, via a partnership with Gowalla. The team made a special set of drink coasters, it’s going to scatter them around the conference, and anyone can redeem the coaster for a free drink from the team; Gowalla is providing digital versions of the coasters, with the same reward.

In any case, f8 is looking like an especially opportune time for a launch.

Bigger competitors are also looming. Google and Twitter, in some sense Facebook’s main competition, both have location-based services already. Google’s Latitude has been out for many months, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, partly because the interface is always on in the background, trasmitting your location. Changing Latitude to the “check-in” model and making it a more central part of Buzz, its new activity feed aggregator, could be a good way for Google to get in on the location action, as TechCrunch details — but now Buzz is out of the gate, with issues. But expect Google to work hard in this area, especially with its larger push into mobile with Android and the Nexus One. Twitter, meanwhile, has been testing a way for users to show the locations of their tweets for months, and that feature appears to going live for all users soon.

Location and Facebook’s Business

Getting into location will likely help Facebook accelerate into more local advertising. It has already been making location a part of its advertising services, in some sense. Advertisers can target ads on the site based on country, region or cities — as of today, thousands of cities. And Page owners can share news feed items with fans who identify themselves as being in certain geographic locations. Local businesses now have half of the 3 billion Pages on the site, according to Facebook statistics, and make up an increasingly large portion of spending on Facebook’s fast-growing performance advertising service.

A location-based service that allows users to specify where they are down to the building, for example, would provide data to Facebook and advertisers about the places they frequent. This could help Page owners and advertisers target ads to be more relevant.

Facebook has other reasons to want to try its hand at location now. It has quickly grown to 400 million monthly active users (it announced in early February, so the number is likely a bit  higher today). And around the same time it said that 100 million of these people access the service every month via their mobile phones, up from 65 million in September. Meanwhile, more and more mobile devices offer some way to share location. That’s a lot of people who can start quickly sharing their location with Facebook friends.

­Women make up the majority of Facebook users and their presence on the social network has not gone unnoticed by department stores, who have set up shop on Facebook (literally, in some cases) in an effort to foment a relationship with their customers as fans. We recently reported that women in the U.S. constituted over 56% of the overall Facebook population, part of a longtime trend, especially women between 26 and 44 who are more likely to have disposable income to spend and are likely to spend it on themselves.

We looked at a total of seven department stores that seemed to be focusing most, if not all, their efforts on women: Bloomingdale’s had about 21,000 fans and Macy’s had 256,000 or so (they’re owned by the same company), Dillard’s with under 19,000 fans, JC Penney with almost 784,000 fans, Kohl’s had over 952,000 fans, Nordstrom with almost 55,000 and Sears with more than 158,000 fans.

Most of the Pages: actively updated their status with store deals, allowed fans to post to the Wall (except Sears) and were very responsive to posts/comments. In terms of media, they featured a lot of photo albums, mostly of merchandise, a few dozen videos, links to their web sites. They highlighted specials in some way — either with a tab, a box or an application. Only a few used discussion boards, events or notes frequently but all of them linked to Facebook from their web sites (and vise versa on Facebook) and were pretty active about talking back to the customers who posted/commented on their Walls. Dillard’s included a full-service store on their Facebook Page.

Three of the stores featured specials or apps on their Facebook landing pages; JC Penney included a slide show of swim suits, Macy’s The Daily Fashion Challenge app/game which linked to their site for a chance to win a $500 gift card and Sears promoted “amazing offers” only for Facebook fans.

Apps the stores featured on their Pages were interesting because they had a wide range. Kohl’s had an LC Lauren Conrad tab that included an app to see the making of her collection, in addition to boxes for Twitter and YouTube and videos. Macy’s create a game/app called The Daily Fashion Challenge asking users to create an outfit from merchandise to enter to win a $500 gift card, although the game was played on Macy’s web site, not Facebook, one place the company could make a change to more fully engage their fans. Dillard’s had the most exciting app, an online store, complete with inventory, a shopping basket, and the ability to purchase right on Facebook.

Dillard’s also included an interesting on their Facebook Page, Phoebe “The Fit Girl,” a mascot-like cartoon that helps women find the proper sizes for undergarments; Phoebe even has her own Facebook Page and blog, both featured on Dillard’s Page. The Page also featured a Polls tab with a lot of polls, a signup tab for their email/mail lists, a Twitter tab filled with tweets and an I Do tab for weddings that linked to their web site, strange considering how the company created a store online but didn’t do the same for their wedding registry.

Most Pages built in many, many tabs.

Kohl’s had a Celeb Style tab, Receipt Contest tab, Scholarship Tab, Green Scene tab, Style & Savings tab and a lot of activity on their discussion tab; each of these tabs was well-built with information about the contest, scholarship, green programs or ways to save money at the store. JC Penney had a Weekly Obsession tab for highlighted items, a Spring Poll tab, Style File and Sweepstakes tabs. Macy’s had a tab for prom, a Trend Report tab featuring “hot” merchandise, a Give Back tab for charities on Facebook and a Polls tab that had seen more than 44,500 people vote since August. Sears included tabs for their rewards program, a Theme Song Quiz, a YouTube tab and was the only store to feature a Careers tab.

Compared to some of the other categories of Facebook Pages we’ve investigated, the department stores seem to be on the ball. Dillard’s, of course, took this one step further by featuring a full store on their Page, but they could also have done the same with their wedding registry. Overall, most of these stores incorporated their merchandise and specials into everything they did on Facebook, creating original content to keep fans on the social network and paying attention to what their fans said about and to them. For retailers looking to take further advantage of Facebook Pages and other features for reaching customers, be sure to check out our Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook has expanded its list of “preferred” developers who help brands, celebrities and a wide variety of organizations build applications, Facebook Connect integrations, or custom features for Facebook Pages. This means more visibility for the 36 newly added developer-consultants, so maybe some new clients for them. There are now 50 companies listed, more than half are operating internationally, and in a total of 15 countries.

Facebook created the Preferred Developer Consultant Program last December, and is continuing to accept applications from prospective companies, more here. Our Facebook Marketing Bible also contains a list of service providers that we recommend.

Here are the new companies in alphabetical order, followed by a list of the existing ones. Note the addition of Techlightenment and 77Agency, two companies that provide automation services for bulk purchases of Facebook’s performance ads.

New firms on Facebook’s list:

• 77Agency Ltd.


• Always Be Social by Blueye Creative


• Brand Networks


• Candytech.biz


• Carrot Creative


• Fan Appz, Inc.


• Fission Strategy


• Fluid


• Friend2Friend


• Gamaroff Digital


• GroupCard Apps


• Hearsay Labs


• i2we, inc


• Inigral, Inc.


• Kitoks.com


• Komfo


• KRDS


• Large Animal Games


• Nudge Social Media


• Plexipixel Inc.


• Promoqube


• Ralph


• Resource Interactive


• Sociabliz


• SocialAmp


• Syncapse


• T3 (The Think Tank)


• Techlightenment


• theKBuzz


• Thuzi


• Transpond, Inc.


• VaynerMedia


• Votigo, Inc.


• Wishpot


• Xihit Solutions GmbH


• Zibaba

They’re joining these firms, already on the list:

Large populations and growing internet connectivity are pushing Asia’s Pacific Rim countries to the forefront on Facebook. Our latest stats, for the month of February, show Indonesia and the Philippines picking up a combined three million users, more than the combined growth of the entire mainland.

The Philippines, in particular, are jetting ahead. The country just passed 10 million Facebook users overall; according to our forward projections, that number will be multiplied several times over by year’s end. That growth could be bad news for Friendster, the aging social network that found one of its last bastions in the Philippines. Also, note that the data in the report is based on Facebook’s advertising tool, which typically reports traffic a few weeks behind.

Another sub-region of Asia that’s picking up the pace is the Indian subcontinent. India itself is accelerating slightly; but the country to keep an eye on over the next couple months is Pakistan, which doubled its January gains in February. Pakistan now has about double the market penetration of India, at 1.1 percent — although that’s still very low.

Overall, Asia’s Facebook population grew about 8 percent in February, down only slightly from January. It is our third-largest region with 79 million users, or only two percent of the 3.75 billion people in the region. For detailed stats on each country, check out our full Global Market Monitor report.

A couple athletes, a handful of musicians, two shoe companies and a few television shows, plus list regulars made up this week’s Top 20 Facebook Pages. Zynga’s Mafia Wars continues its domination of the number 1 spot with almost 10 million fans, but its partner in crime for the past few weeks, Texas Hold’em Poker, disappeared from the list this week.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars	9,891,127	+364,698	+3.83
2.	Ricardo Kakà	1,165,322	+343,654	+41.82
3.	Converse	2,286,122	+127,174	+5.89
4.	Justin Bieber	2,052,557	+125,802	+6.53
5.	VANS	558,044	+124,530	+28.73
6.	Selena Gomez	3,797,516	+115,649	+3.14
7.	Megan Fox	6,150,914	+109,452	+1.81
8.	Starbucks	6,125,550	+106,906	+1.78
9.	Lady Gaga	5,566,682	+105,651	+1.93
10.	Facebook	7,577,121	+105,370	+1.41
11.	Skittles	3,994,668	+96,120	+2.47
12.	Michael Jackson	11,220,110	+92,391	+0.83
13.	Lil Wayne	3,306,267	+88,310	+2.74
14.	The X Factor	1,012,492	+86,609	+9.35
15.	Cristiano Ronaldo	3,611,756	+84,537	+2.40
16.	Taylor Swift	3,431,201	+76,443	+2.28
17.	Victoria’s Secret	2,935,646	+74,875	+2.62
18.	The Twilight Saga	5,183,477	+68,185	+1.33
19.	YouTube	4,388,681	+67,086	+1.55
20.	Dr. House	4,975,383	+65,841	+1.34

Two soccer (football) players for Real Madrid C.F. were on the list this week. Brazilian player Ricardo Kaká at number 2 with over 1 million fans and heartthrob Cristiano Ronaldo at number 15 with 3.6 million fans. Although both are fairly popular on Facebook, their rankings this week were helped by consolidations of 63,000 last week for Ronaldo (his page only grew by 84,500 so most of it was attributable to those spikes) and 229,000 on Wednesday for Kaká.

Next were the shoes. Vans, the shoe brand popular with skateboarders, seems to have landed at number 5 almost entirely due to what appears to be a page consolidation on Sunday of almost 123,000 (their total growth this week was 124,530), a large part of their fan base, given the Page has just 559,000 fans. Converse was also on the list again this week at number 3; the iconic shoe company grew by almost 111,000 fans Wednesday, but also recently launched a line of shoes featuring designs from the 1980s band Blondie.

Musicians took up another chunk of the list, with teen crooner Justin Bieber fourth with 2 million-plus fans; he’s been promoting a new single and  upcoming album. Another teenage musician, Selena Gomez, landed at number 6, partly due to growth of 90,000 fans over two days likely due to page consolidations, given her page grew by 115,649 last week. But, Gomez also told her 3.8 million fans this week that her latest album went gold, meaning it sold 500,000 copies.

Rapper Lil Wayne took the number 13 spot this week with more than 3 million fans.  Perhaps Lil Wayne’s popularity grew in response to his sentencing hearing scheduled for last week on a weapons charge, but it was delayed due to a fire and he was able to enjoy a few extra days of freedom. Finally, singer Taylor Swift was sixteenth on the list this week; she currently has more than 3 million fans, is on a U.S. tour and the official Taylor Swift iPhone application launched last week.

List regulars this week included seventh place Megan Fox with more than 6 million fans now, Starbucks in eighth place also with over 6 million fans and Lady Gaga at number 9, trailing slightly with about 5.5 million fans, the songstress is currently on tour and has been promoting her new single/video “Telephone” on Facebook with exclusive stills and updates. Facebook’s fan Page landed tenth and Michael Jackson continues to hang out on the list, currently with more than 11 million fans, at number 12 this week.

Number 11 Skittles now has a Page with 4 million fans and grew by about 96,000 fans last week, about 71,000 of which came from two spikes on Wednesday and Sunday, albeit the company is also giving out coupons for a free packet of candy.

The popular television show “The X Factor” landed at number 14 this week almost certainly due to a Page consolidation; this page grew by 86,000 last week, 82,000 of which were added on Wednesday. Another popular television show, “House,” went back on the air this week after a hiatus, consequently the Page grew by 65,800 fans to land at number 20.

Rounding out the list was the number 17 Victoria’s Secret Page, which probably benefitted by 54,000 adds over two days to bring its total fan base on Facebook to about 3 million. At 18 was the “Twilight” Page, now with over 5 million fans and nineteenth was the YouTube Facebook Page.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars	9,891,127	+364,698	+3.83
2.	Ricardo Kakà	1,165,322	+343,654	+41.82
3.	Converse	2,286,122	+127,174	+5.89
4.	Justin Bieber	2,052,557	+125,802	+6.53
5.	VANS	558,044	+124,530	+28.73
6.	Selena Gomez	3,797,516	+115,649	+3.14
7.	Megan Fox	6,150,914	+109,452	+1.81
8.	Starbucks	6,125,550	+106,906	+1.78
9.	Lady Gaga	5,566,682	+105,651	+1.93
10.	Facebook	7,577,121	+105,370	+1.41
11.	Skittles	3,994,668	+96,120	+2.47
12.	Michael Jackson	11,220,110	+92,391	+0.83
13.	Lil Wayne	3,306,267	+88,310	+2.74
14.	The X Factor	1,012,492	+86,609	+9.35
15.	Cristiano Ronaldo	3,611,756	+84,537	+2.40
16.	Taylor Swift	3,431,201	+76,443	+2.28
17.	Victoria’s Secret	2,935,646	+74,875	+2.62
18.	The Twilight Saga	5,183,477	+68,185	+1.33
19.	YouTube	4,388,681	+67,086	+1.55
20.	Dr. House	4,975,383	+65,841	+1.34

Is it enforcement day for Facebook? Several of the top placers on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining apps by monthly active users (MAU) redirect to Facebook’s front page, indicating that the network may have at last taken notice of, and action on, shady tactics used by a particular developer.

We’re not sure, but we think the same developer is behind all the apps in question: Friend Quiz, Friend FAQ, Friend Quizzes – Dating! and Friend Poll!. They’re all among the top ten gainers below:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Static FBML	36,892,114	+9,443,232	+25.60
2.	Friend Quiz	20,667,405	+8,100,641	+39.20
3.	Friend FAQ	13,497,001	+5,736,127	+42.50
4.	Slide FunSpace	23,432,250	+1,705,579	+7.28
5.	Friends Exposed	18,280,121	+1,153,129	+6.31
6.	Marketplace	13,274,027	+1,057,287	+7.97
7.	Friend Quizzes – Dating!	1,001,005	+953,245	+95.23
8.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	1,915,222	+833,647	+43.53
9.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	1,501,781	+746,238	+49.69
10.	Friend Poll!	611,274	+597,203	+97.70
11.	Bubble Island	1,101,968	+594,265	+53.93
12.	Tiki Resort	1,218,159	+575,310	+47.23
13.	FarmVille	83,127,751	+561,878	+0.68
14.	My City Life	3,908,234	+537,319	+13.75
15.	PetVille	19,619,857	+475,914	+2.43
16.	Ninja Saga	3,926,247	+453,121	+11.54
17.	Video 4 You	1,587,038	+410,554	+25.87
18.	MindJolt Games	19,925,788	+398,103	+2.00
19.	Daily Photo	6,659,520	+393,930	+5.92
20.	Translations	379,238	+374,515	+98.75

On Friday, we explained how these quiz apps were subverting Facebook’s developer policies. After Facebook added mandatory opt-outs for users allowing them to decline giving their email address or permission to post to their wall, these apps added in boxes of their own that forced the user to hand over permissions, or else go away.

The takedown will be a big blow to the developer, who is listed on two of the apps as FriendQuizzes, Inc. Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ don’t list a developer name, but all four are identical in form and function. In total, this group of apps had over 35 million MAU, about as many users as Facebook’s third-largest app overall.

One developer’s (self-inflicted) bad luck could be another’s jackpot strike. Topzy, which makes Friends Exposed, should be dancing for joy; its quiz app is very similar to those banned, but it has survived unscathed and free to pick up all the quiz-bereft users. As you can see from its placement at number five above, Friends Exposed was already growing strongly.

Rounding out the top growers this week: Static FBML isn’t worth more than a passing mention, as it’s just a Facebook-built app for customizing Pages that’s indirectly picking up users. Slide FunSpace is coming off a growth binge spurred by Slide figuring how to take advantage of Facebook’s new policies — although, obviously, with more respect for the actual rules than the unfortunate quiz developer. Marketplace has a similar story, except its surge came from a sweepstakes.

Boomerang Networks has spent the last year quietly building an advertising offers service designed to take on established players like Offerpal and Super Rewards. Now, it’s taking the covers off.

Every offers company is busy trying to optimize which ads appear to which users. Boomerang’s offer wall includes thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons so users can vote on which ones they like. That’s the beginning: the company combines this user feedback with user comments, profile data — as Facebook’s and others’ terms of service allow — as well as number of clicks. Then, it analyzes the data to figure out which types of offers make the best fit between the user base (by country, age and sex), the category of application, and the price the users are typically willing to pay for the offers relative to the game. When users interact with the resulting offers, Boomerang gathers more information on their behavior and further optimizes the offers. It also has a customer service team pre-screen for deceptive offers, it says, and won’t repeatedly show offers to users who take them or vote them down.

The company has made internationalization a priority. Chief executive Honor Gunday tells us it has deals with more than 130 advertising networks around the world, so it is able to filter offers to be relevant to users in specific places. He provides a rough breakdown of what this looks like. For medium to high-engagement games in the US, offers can bring in from $1.00 to $1.50 per user; in southeast Asian countries, $0.50 to $0.80; in Latin America, $0.10 to $0.20.

The offer wall includes some other notable features. It has direct payments from more than 60 providers around the world. Although some are available through payment aggregators like PayByCash, Gunday also says that it has brought in some options not available through most rivals, such as Cherry Credits in Southeast Asia. The wall also provides categories of offers by content type and popularity, and shows banner ads. To make the experience easier for users, it also provides a detailed customer feedback form about each offer, and provides a window showing pending payouts and past offer votes.

Users also can click to view a full “customer relationship management” interface showing them the following information about each completed offer: title, date taken, status, earned or expected amount of virtual currency, payout timeframe, and user-generated quality ranking.

Boomerang’s current publicly-named clients include TheBroth and Hitgrab, and is in talks with more. The service is now live for apps on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. Boomerang has raised a round of funding from angel investors, but the amount has not been disclosed.