> - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid.
It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel.
It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
Was it that hard? "If you make money on our platform, you need to give us a percentage," seems sort of like an obvious monetization strategy. Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Most of the apps at the time optimized for pageviews and monetized through DoubleClick, AdSense and other third-party ad networks, so there was non-trivial task of proving that "making money" was happening, followed by further non-trivial task of actually collecting such revenue from all of the jurisdictions.
> Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.
Comments
It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel.
It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
Was it that hard? "If you make money on our platform, you need to give us a percentage," seems sort of like an obvious monetization strategy. Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Most of the apps at the time optimized for pageviews and monetized through DoubleClick, AdSense and other third-party ad networks, so there was non-trivial task of proving that "making money" was happening, followed by further non-trivial task of actually collecting such revenue from all of the jurisdictions.
Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.