5 Money Creation Opportunities on Facebook
With the release of its new platform, Facebook’s recent venture in social media presents a unique prospect for marketers, developers and businesses to tap into the social network’s young, active, and viral crowd.
However, over the past few weeks there has been a growing concern among developers to expose ways to monetize their Facebook applications. The curse of instant online success is that you can no longer sustain costly servers to support hundreds and thousands (or even millions) of Facebook users. The question: how can the developers of Facebook apps really make money? We don’t have all the answers so far, but here are 5 suggestions:
1. SELL. Develop applications exclusively for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most fresh example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.
2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.
3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.
4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable revenue depending on the application’s idea, purpose, size, and prospective users.
5. GET INVESTMENT. If you suppose you have something giant on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely lessons of act for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook.
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Facebook has a massive active community. It is reported more that of the 30 million dynamic users, about half online in each day. This is a rarity among Web 2.0 companies (comparatively, Google Videos has about 3% active users). If Facebook (Facebook) can convince its users to shell out $1 to send those silly virtual “gift” images to each other, then definitely a clever developer or startup can find other approaches to earning funds from a Facebook application that do not entail just drowning their users in advertisement.
Due to the pace of innovation and improvement over the web, it is very important that companies jump on opportunities like these as they turn up. LinkedIn (LinkedIn) and Bebo are expected to release their own set of developer APIs as well; I personally cannot remain to be among the first to tap into that prospect. I recommend others to begin planning as well.
This is modified post written by Jawad Shuaib, developer of Shuzak, a social network for geeks. He also built the “Favorite Books” Facebook application.
Sources : http://mashable.com/2007/07/26/money-making-facebook/
