Social entertainment company RockYou just announced that it has acquired Facebook casino developer Ryzing, creators of the Bingo by Ryzing. According to RockYou the acquisition brings a powerful monetization model in rewards-based gaming to RockYou, plus a real-money, proprietary gaming platform, and a flagship title in Bingo by Ryzing.  The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Through its publishing arm, RockYou Studio Partners, the company announced a partnership with Philadelphia-based Ryzing. in January of this year. After working closely with the Ryzing team to grow Bingo, RockYou decided to acquire the studio and its bingo game.  Ryzing has six employees and 3-4 people from RockYou were working on the team, according to RockYou CEO Lisa Marino.

Lisa also shared with us that the revenue split between ads and virtual goods sales in the bingo game is about 35:65. In RockYou’s Zoo world the split is about  40:60. Bingo by Ryzing enables Facebook users to enter bingo tournaments for a chance to win real-world prizes through free sweepstakes drawings. Although the game is not very appealing to the eye it grew constantly to reach an all time high of 620.000 MAU (monthly active user) and 80.000 DAU (daily active user) according to AppStats.

Bingo by Ryzing has developed a loyal and growing fan-base who play to win everything from cash prizes to charity contributions and luxury vacations. Its social aspects, like in-game chat, posting the news and of winnings and voting for charities to receive donations, helped it win Facebook Bingo Game of the Year in a survey by WhichBingo.co.uk.

AppStats: Bingo by Ryzing

Marino explains  that “RockYou is a media company at heart, focused on driving the highest value per engagement in social games. With this acquisition we become a unique social media company that combines a rewards-based gaming platform with our existing robust ad monetization solutions,” and continues that “Not only is real-money gaming superior in monetization to other types of game genres, it is also an accelerator for our ad monetization solutions, and ports well to mobile and other platforms. These solutions can be used not only for our own titles, but for those of our publishing partners.”

The CEO also explained to us that the main objective for Q3 will be to grow Bingo and to release a second rewards-based gaming title.