Now is the Time to Profit From Facebook
January 22, 2008 Posted by Nick B.Technology moves at breakneck speeds. It’s no wonder that there are more millionaires in the U.S. today than ever before. According to CNN, in 2006, there were nearly 9 million millionaires in the U.S. Unfortunately for me, I am not yet one of those. However, with new opportunities arising on a regular basis, the online landscape is prime for the plucking and profiting. It is now easier than ever to earn money online, and a few individuals have really been able to capitalize on the power of the Internet. Think “The Million Dollar Homepage”, fark.com, boingboing.net. All these websites started with a dream, passion, and the willingness to explore uncharged territory. Their ideas were somewhat novel at the time of their inception and lucky for them, the public loved them. Now all of these sites are either staples or household names around certain communities.
Today, however, it’s not so easy to become rich by creating a website based on selling pixels, making jokes, or writing current events. It now takes a bit more creativity and effort, but there is still plenty of money to be made. One of the reigning online champions in terms of popularity and earning potential is undoubtedly Facebook. Boasting ridiculous growth rates and statistics such as
- More than 61 million active users
- An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
- An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007
- Active users doubling every 6 months
it is no wonder that anyone with an enterprising mind is flocking to Facebook in the search for a quick buck. It can be likened to the Gold Rush. Those that get there first and figure out a good way to get the money will be the ones whose names we’ll hear about for a long time to come.
With an open architecture and over 61 MILLION users at your fingertips, the trick is figuring out how to get those Facebook users to give you the time of day. There are many developers and applications willing to help you advertise on Facebook, including Facebook itself. As I wrote in one of my blog posts, the help-yourself Facebook Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad platform just was’t working too well for me. As a lowly affiliate, I haven’t yet quite figured out how to make Facebook PPC work for me.
However, if you are a developer, then you must certainly hear about Appsaholic. Appsaholic is one of several startups wanting to become the defacto advertising platform on Facebook. Run by SocialMedia.com, Appsaholic enables you to buy installs of your application and make the available across all of Facebook. Citing some success, Appsaholic has made at least one person more than $100,000 from their application “My Aquarium”. With the ability to easily manage your application development and an intuitive interface to check your statistics, it seems that Appsaholic is your best bet for deploying a Facebook Application.
Do you have a good idea for a Facebook application? Do you have what it takes to rake in the money? The odds are that you already have an account on Facebook. Let your creative juices flow out so that money can come flowing back in! Go on over to Facebook’s “Developer Community”, check out the API and start developing. They’ve made it really simple for you to develop applications and that is one other benefit that Facebook has over MySpace. All you have to do is click a few buttons and their development libraries are available for your use in your Facebook profile. If you have skillz, it makes no sense for you not to at least try this! You could be the next big thing!
To learn more about monetizing your Facebook applications, check out the following resources:
- Socialmedia FAQ
- Monetizing Facebook Applications
- A Much Better Approach to Facebook Application Monetization
- Monetizing Facebook Applications (another one)
Nick is a 20-something full time grad student and full time IT guy. Specializing in Information Architecture, he often dabbles in online projects. His latest project, a blog at http://www.learnhow2earn.com, is a project that details his online money making experiences. Like what he has to say? Check him out and drop a comment!
Another decent guest post by Nick B. I agree with the fact that now is the best time to profit from facebook, and with that I’d take bebo into consideration since they opened their developers application with the idea you only need a few tweaks for it to work on bebo too
Even if MySpace is still in the lead, they’ve had quite an impressive growth rate and it seems that it’s just a matter of time until they become market leaders if things continue to develop this way.
Alan Johnson
yup 😀 facebook is way better than myspace. Myspace is almost like a place where people show off, and not really about social networking.
Exactly. I gave up my myspace because it became more of a bar than a business meeting. 😛
I like facebook better than myspace. Facebook is just so much cleaner. I mean minues the 50000 application requests i get a day. but at least i dont get 50000 pieces of spam like i do on myspace.
If you do build a facebook application be sure to plan in advance to have a revenue model.
The advertising opportunities currently present to facebook developers pay literally pennies per click and the click through ratio on those ads is very minimal.
Note lotteries and adult content is not allowed in facebook so don’t bother if you are planning on those types of applications.
Creating a facebook application is not that difficult if you know PHP. Just plan to allow your application to scale from few hundred people to a possible 10,000+. The major hump for most is not the code it’s the hosting so as I said before be sure you have a revenue model in place to sustain that kind of hosting required.
Hmm… if only somebody could suggest a host to use…. 😉
wow you need your own host for the apps? I guess that makes sense. Some apps are used by hundreds of thousands of people. must be hard on the server.
I heard PPA like zango have done well on facebook.
I know I shouldn’t generalize, but that seems contrary to common sense. Most Facebook users are young and broke.
Thanks for the feedback guys. 😉
@bluefur:
I think you’re absolutely right. To get into the facebook apps “business” (which is exactly what it is…), you have to have a solid plan in order to be able to capitalize on the opportunity.
Cheers for this one Tyler. I always wanted to know what the big deal about Facebook was!
I don’t think the big deal with facebook involves api’s at all. It’s the fact that it’s probably one of the only social networking sites out there that doesn’t look like crap and is full of ads(myspace).
Def a big market. Wish i had the skills or money to get into it.
it doesn’t seem that you would need too much money to run your own app if you had the skills 😉
Yea thats what im saying, I personally dont have the skills at the moment (or time), therefore id have to pay someone.
Unfortunately application development does require some knowledge of…developing applications. It’s not one of those “oh, I’ll give it a whirl” situations if you don’t know how to program. However, if you’re not fortunate enough to be a great programmer, you can always hire one to do it for you. Try scriptlance.com if you’re serious about it…you can get someone to code an application for you for a reasonable fee.
http://www.joyent.com/developers/facebook
Joyent are offering free hosting for facebook apps.
There are limits to how many users it could support I’m sure but you have the option of paying for more services if it gets really popular.
There are so many crappy facebook apps oout there, it seems like a great opportunity for someone to create some genuinely useful applications.
Very nice…. great post Tyler. Mark Zuckerberg is the man… He’s taken Facebook to a whole new level. Cheers!
some people actually hate what he has done to facebook. opening its doors to non uni people for one was one of the big ones.
interesting post.
How long would it take a noice programmer to learn how to program with the Facebook API ? Are there any good examples I could start with ?
I have a great idea that I’d like to make into reality, but I’m not sure if my programming skills are up to scratch.
Becky
Becky,
As far as I understand it, once you have your application up and going in a non-facebook setting, getting it ready with the FB API is quite trivial; it’s a matter of adding a few function calls to retrieve and store user data.
Do a Google search for “facebook api tutorial” and take a look at some of the top results – they should help clear up any other questions.
Best,
Nick
Earn money from it, probably if is good everyone will think about having it.
[…] Tyler Cruz on Now is the Time to Profit From Facebook […]
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of traffic from facebook to my political/philosophy websites by just creating groups that are relevant, and putting a little blip about the website.
Same for YouTube.
[…] Now is the Time to Profit From Facebook from TylerCruz […]
Wow. Nine million millionaires…that just clicked. o.o
I agree. Facebook is the future since we’re in the smartist era of a web 2.0 internet boom.
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Tektonik Press
http://cnn.com/2002/US/01/25/gen.war.against.terror/index.html
Way to call the top. Facebook apps are now almost as difficult to get success with as a make money online blog. 🙂