

Facebook platform developers could see $500M in revenue this year - coglethorpe
http://venturebeat.com/2009/05/08/facebook-platform-developers-could-see-500m-in-revenue-this-year/

======
bemmu
Back of the envelope calculations are fun. I think a typical app will make
$1-$10 (ad based vs. virtual currency based) per month for each 1000 monthly
active users. Let's say about 20% of apps are virtual currency based, so $2.8.
The top 20 apps on facebook have total 179M active users, so they would make
$6M per year. If the top 20 accounts for 50% of traffic, that would pin total
Facebook app earnings to $12M/year.

If I recall correctly, Joel has once said that the cost of office space
accounts for something like 6% of their revenue. At another time I think he
mentioned their new office costs $50000/month, so their revenue would be
$10M/year.

So Fog Creek software makes as much as all apps on Facebook combined?-)

Edit: Read the article. Even Zynga alone seems to be making more than my whole
estimate. Oopsie.

------
spolsky
I finally figured it out.

When reading headlines,

s/could/won't/g

and

s/\?$/? No./g

~~~
edw519
lol - very good, Joel. Perhaps the seed of a new Fog Creek product, "Forum
Scrubber".

------
spaghetti
In other news Microsoft employees could see Linus Torvalds around campus in
Redmond attending Windows 7 Evangelist training.

