

Why I stepped away from Facebook development - hwijaya
http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/why-i-stepped-back-from-facebook-development/

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vital101
The author makes a good point about dependency on another company. Having your
side project or startup completely at the whim of another company is not a
good business model.

Might be good for a quick dollar, but it's not sustainable.

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asimjalis
It's a double-edged sword. The big advantage of the platform is leverage: you
get to leverage their technology and their existing user base.

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vital101
That's true. I suppose you just have to be willing to keep up with any changes
they make to their TOS. For instance, Apple limiting the development languages
on their new Iphone/Ipad/Itouch OS.

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aymeric
This has been ok for a year or so but in the last 6 months Facebook has
introduced a lot of breaking changes (ie: removing the notifications, and
stream.publish)

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asimjalis
Interesting write up on the pros and cons of developing for a platform like
Facebook.

Is there any information on how much money Facebook apps usually make? What
are the earnings like on free apps that don’t charge subscriptions?

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aymeric
It is hard to answer this question, it really depends on the nature of your
application and the mother tongue of your users.

Applications with english users tend to be much better paid than other
languages.

But it is easier to be visible in a less crowded market like Indonesia, or the
recently growing asian countries.

I remember that on my ads (targetting french users) I was getting an eCPM
oscilating between $0.06 on a RPG game and $0.40 on a quizz application which
is quite low in comparison to the english application standards.

It also depends on the ad network you use (some ad network performs better
than others depending on your application).

There is no generic rule. You have to experiment all of them to see which one
works better.

I was making 15000 euros per month with 50K users per day on a RPG game (as
opposed to casual game) using various monetization strategy.

On a quizz application, with 1 million active users per day (20 millions page
views) I reached $3000 a day without any direct partnership (simply by adding
a basic ad from RockYou) with ads only

