US game publisher Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) has announced its FY15 Q3 financials, for the 3 months ending 30 September 2015.

Revenue was $196 million, down 2% quarter-on-quarter, but up 11% year-on-year.

Net income was $3 million.

Zynga made a loss of $27 million three months ago, and a loss of $57 million 12 months ago.

The company ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $1.1 billion.

It also announced a $200 million share buyback that could last through to October 2017.

Better operations

"Our teams delivered a strong Q3 driven by the performance by Wizard of Oz Slots, Words With Friends and our newly launched Empires & Allies," said CEO Mark Pincus.

Around 69% of Zynga's booking are now generated from mobile games, up from 26% a year ago.

Pincus was also keen to talk up how Zynga was improving its monetisation.

"In Q3, we saw average bookings per user (ABPU) grow 27% year-over-year and 10% sequentially," he said.

The company is also pushing heavily into advertising, growing that revenue was up 39% year-over-year and 17% sequentially to $45 million.

Audience slide

During the quarter, Zynga's average DAUs, dropped 10% compared to Q2 to 19 million.

However, mobile DAUs were only down 6%.

MAUs were also down 10% to 75 million, while mobile MAUs were down 5% to 61 million.

Indeed, Zynga's audience has been on the slide for the past year. 

Payer conversion rate was 1.7% compared to 1.6% in Q2, although this improvement was likely due to the average monthly payer total dropping from 1 million to 900,000.

[source: Zynga]