How to make money from facebook Apps - The test
I do like a challenge, and after recently watching an excellent presentation on facebook marketing (and how to make money from facebook apps) I decided that I was definitely going to publish a facebook application before *everyone* is doing it in my preferred niche. It is trend setters that get paid, and the early bird catches the worm, or so I have been told.
At my request, one of my buddies with some ASP.net savvy developed the application together to my spec (he had developed a vaguely similar application after I showed him the videos I link to above). We decided to go 50/50 on the venture incidentally.
The Experiment: can we make any money from a facebook app?
The Application:- "my poker schedule for facebook" allows the user to share their poker playing schedule with their contacts (whether the event is live or online). User simply enter the location, date/time as well as the poker room if the game is online.
How does this facebook app make money?If the user chooses to enter poker events which they plan on entering into the application, an affiliate hyperlink is displayed to contacts with the same application installed. If somebody decides they wish to join you, or sign up to the poker room in question and deposit, we get either a CPA or revenue share (for life!). Similar applications might include what you are reading (perhaps with an affiliate link to purchase that book Amazon, for any interested parties), or a What Video Game I am playing Facebook App.
This is what appears in your profile once you add an event to your schedule:
Tracking Facebook App Stats:
The Facebook developer application can be added to a developers profile. This app offers access to a facebook developers discussion board, and most importantly, statistics which pertain to that developers facebook applications. After 24 hours, our application has 63 users. We can see if any of our contacts added/removed the app, and people can leave feedback / feature requests on the application "wall" (which is linked to from the app itself).
Third party tracking sites are available such as adnomics: Facebook Analytics and Marketing, which allow you to compare your app to other popular apps and which can offer estimated valuations as to the worth of your facebook application, should you wish to sell it.
In any case, this is a cheap and cheerful experiment - I’ll blog up the stats in the coming weeks/months and hopefully I’ll deploy some more mainstream applications in an attempt to acquire and retain a greater volume of users in.
It is my opinion that the more socially interactive the applications are, the more installs and long-term use they will get - however seasonal and gimmick applications no doubt have explosive marketing potential (which or may not be be realised - depending on whether advertisers are given enough advance time to purchase the apps in question).
It sound easy doesn’t it? Can you forsee yourself putting a facebook application together in the next 6 months? How will you make your money? CPC? toolbars? CPM? Selling ads? The scope is endless.
Here in lies the dilemna, I hate facebook applications, infact I’ve deleted all of them. its great if you can make a dollar off it, more power to you. But I hate this type of gimmock myself and as a result couldn’t be bothered to build such an application. I’d be interested to see how it works out though.
Comment by Gavin — February 14, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Hi,
Very interesting blog, I’ve looked into the facebook apps myself a couple of months ago and now with the bebo apps I’m getting more interested.
My problem is developing the things, where to start, I know a good bit of php from developing the site initially so thought I could do it myself but found it all very confusing.
Do you know of good tutorials for this?
As regards what I would do with it, I guess I would develop the app or apps so they would link to my site, boosting my site up!
Thanks
Gary
Comment by Gary Corcoran — February 19, 2008 @ 4:03 pm