

Ask HN: how does one monetize a facebook app? - paulnelligan

Theoretically speaking, say you have a free facebook app with 1 million users.  How would you monetize it?
======
patio11
"Sell them virtual goods" seems to be the hot answer at the moment. It depends
on what your app does, though -- if they're sticky users who care about their
avatar, then sell them stuff. If they're transients taking a viral quiz, well,
you're not going to get nearly so much money. (Though I heard of one guy who,
for viral quizzes, would award people with a prize: a free trial signup to
$AFFILIATE_OFFER. That apparently converted very, very well.)

~~~
pw
I think he's referring to Jeremy Schoemaker (a.k.a Mr. Shoemoney) who awarded
Netflix trials as part of a Nebraska Cornhuskers (a college football team)
trivia quiz.

This was mentioned in Jeremy's Mixergy interview
(<http://mixergy.com/shoemoney-ads/>), and probably other places as well.

------
terra_t
I think there are two kinds of people:

(a) people with a lot of time and little money, and (b) people with a lot of
money and little time

(Ok, there are two other quadrants, but no money, no time people are useless
to use, and lots of money/lots of time is a rare and unstable situation.)

Facebook is really full of the type (a) sort of people. Maybe things are
better for them now, but as of a year ago, Facebook's overall eCPM was about
10% of the eCPM of the sites that I run... And my sites don't have
astronomical eCPM numbers.

It's not say that people can't make money off Facebook, because you can, but
the real gold mine in Facebook is that you've got a community of people who
will spend unlimited amounts of time on online activities. Personally, I'd
prefer to suck them in and get them to create content for me that I can market
(by other channels) to the type (b) people.

Another nice thing about FB is that you don't have as much trouble with
griefers as you do if you're running your own auth system. People care about
their FB accounts and they don't want to look like complete jerks in front of
their friends.

I really wish I could pay people Facebook credits for doing work for me. My
guess is that you could probably get $25 worth of work for $10 worth of
Facebook credits, undercutting Mechanical Turk.

They won't make it easy for you to pay out credits, unfortunately, because
people would discover that gambling would be just as profitable on Facebook as
it is in most other places.

------
paulnelligan
and lo and behold I find this:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html)

Wow!!

~~~
com
Yeah - but I wonder how long this kind of thing (I was just thinking
"unethical goldmine") will last because it puts two parts of the business
model of Facebook at risk.

1) the (laughable) idea that Facebook is a trustworthy place to put all your
drunken photos to share with your future employers, parents-in-law etc, which
drives up adoption rates amongst the public

2) the likelihood that Facebook is doing very similar (but probably marginally
more privacy-sensitive) deals with the same privacy-infringing companies as
RapLeaf, and that they don't want their rates to decrease per naked identity
sold on the basis of increased competition and a comparatively worse infoset
compared with what the apps are providing to RapLeaf and friends

A profit share probably isn't interesting for FB if you agree with the
analysis above, so my bet is that they're going to try to come down hard on
the apps that are doing this.

