Anybody who's spent time at Facebook knows how much the social networking site has evolved over the years. While at first it was little more than a personal contact point for people who went to college, they eventually evolved their social functions to include more people. What really pushed the site over the top, however, was engaging content that caused "stickiness" and got people really involved in their profiles like their own mini-websites.

The lessons of Facebook can be applied to a lot of sites, and have even in a way affected the MMO company Outspark. Outspark started out with the content first and then moved to a community-site structure later, but engaging your customers in a meaningful, social manner that really gives your users a sense of ownership of the site is always a good plan. We talked with Susan Choe, CEO and founder of Outspark, about the rise of her site and how much cheaper virtual weddings are compared to the real thing.

Making sparks
Outspark's brief history begins in January of 2007. Then, the company was described more as PowerPoint focused and as an "incubator unit." With its first games launching in July 2007 and digital item sales following in October of that year, we were curious how the company has managed to grow so rapidly in such a short period of time.

"It's just smart marketing," responded Choe, on Outspark's growth to 3.5 million users. "We started off leveraging the data analytics through direct and viral marketing, which really had an impact on our geographic reach initially. Another point to add: our 2 million uniques a month is 75 percent in North America in that key 16 – 25 year-old demographic, and we will expand that internationally because we are good at geo-targeting."

Not all play-for-free sites can claim most of their client base is in North America, even if they are based in the U.S. When asked what Outspark's appeal was in North America, Choe responded, "We had the right messaging and our infrastructure was configured for the region. Of other companies, if you dig into the marketing, they maybe just 'sprayed and prayed' with their marketing, but we do by source and we continually optimize what we're doing, and that comes from the experience of having worked for Yahoo, a business experience where we managed six different markets."

Face to face still matters
Promotions for a small, start-up online site usually aren't that high scale. Getting that first initial push can often be the hardest part before achieving some degree of a user base. As it turns out, some personal networking helped Outspark in the beginning.

"One of my friends was a founder of bit.torrent, and he did me a favor and threw some traffic our way. I had some friends at Fox who did the same," explained Choe. "I didn't even have a marketing team back then and it was very low-grade back in the early days. For our game developers, they really have to hit the pavement and have games with depth of content and commercial viability. Other than funding from VCs, we didn't have much money, so they put a lot of content out there. For a long time, [the developers] had to worry about money for simple expenses but now they have surplus on their hands."

"Initially, we focused on Korean developers, but now we're getting submissions from around the world, and so long as the game is fun and the micro-transaction model works, we'll take it," she continued. "With our games, you have to have a model that suits our gamers today, especially where you provide the content for free and start charging for things they want. Sometimes we get submissions with very limited content, and as cool as it might be, you need to have a lot to offer to the customer: you can't run a department store with just five shirts."