Analyst reckons it pays $300 to acquire customers who spend $150 then leave.
Arvind Bhatia, an interactive entertainment analyst with Sterne Agee, has been looking at Zynga's own stats and disclosed his conclusions to Benzinga.
His maths are as follows: Zynga spent $120m on sales and marketing for the first nine months. It had 3.4 million unique payers in the September quarter, which is up from 3 million at the end of December 2010.
That's 400,000 new payers at a cost of $120 million or $300 per person.
Bhatia asserts that a new customer generally stays with Zynga for about 12 to 15 months, spending about $150 .
Hence the $150 number.
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He reckons there's a slowdown in social gaming in general, and notes that each new game launch seems to have a shorter life.
“Those (games) are peaking within a couple of weeks and then coming down very rapidly. They have to replace what is inevitably slower growth from the existing titles with newer titles, and clearly the newer titles aren't as strong," he said.
He also believes the experimentation phase is over, and that this is harming the social gaming space.
“When Facebook was in rapid growth mode, millions and millions of new people were trying these Zynga games just by default, and now it's getting harder.
It's a pretty apocalyptic interview, in which Bhatia also speaks negatively about the prospects for monetisation from mobile and gambling. Read it here.
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