[mattmaroon]

I don't know that it's so much Facebook ad prices going up (they haven't gone up much really) as it is Zynga having burned through all of the potential cow clickers. When you run a Facebook ad, the price per user increases as you saturate the market, even if the overall network's prices remain steady, due to clickthroughs dropping.

Zynga games are typically low-RPU, mass appeal, which as you mentioned relies on cheap traffic (mostly from other Zynga games.) You can only keep shuffling people internally from one game to another for so long until they all leave for Candy Crush Saga.

[alizaki]

You're probably right, FB prices went up for Zynga more so than others because they saturated their market (which just took longer cause it was bigger). However, anecdotally, I've seen FB prices rise 25 - 35% over the last 18 months.