Facebook Freakonomics: Why Apps Die
January 28, 2008
A very interesting post appeared on the Facebook Developer Forums today, written by member Darxider. The topic, entitled Facebook Freakonomics: Why Apps Die, provides a very interesting perspective regarding how much money the average developer should expect to earn from their applications.
The gist of the post is that of about 50,000,000 Facebook users and roughly 15,000 public applications, applications are averaging $60/month. Contrasting this to the $60+/hour that some developers are earning casts a great shadow over the riches that many presume can be made see in creating Facebook applications.
However, it is important to note that the author of the post does make several assumptions. For one, he assumes that each visitor will only have one page impression per visit, which is typically not the case. Additionally, while some information is publicly provided by Facebook and third party sources like Compete, Darxider does not state the source of some of his other numbers, such as daily visitors percentage.
Even if the post is remotely accurate though, it’s obvious that monetization strategy must be seriously considered in order for an application to be considered feasible and worthy of the time and effort required to complete it — not to mention the commitment necessary to ensure it remains compatible with the Facebook Platform.
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I’m just starting in facebook monetization, but I have done a fair bit of normal website monetisation. The key is not to expect awesome results too quickly - write off a certain proportion of your capital for advertising - establish a userbase - make sure users look at a few pages - make sure there’s a reason for users to come back to your site.
One of my sites just makes $10 a day which means that it will take a year to claw back the initial costs involved with setting up the site, coding it and advertising it. But if it goes for 5 years (I imagine it will go for longer) then I will make $15,000 profit for a few weeks work.
You HAVE to think long term.