Lately I’ve been really trying my best to wrap my head around Facebook, mostly because I’m in the process of working on a few local community sites and I think Facebook is a great way to reach out to these folks. So I was intrigued to read Mashable’s latest on how to make money on Facebook.
1. SELL. Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.
2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.
3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.
4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.
5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think you have something big on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook.
Source: Mashable
2 responses so far ↓
Michael Martine || Aug 3, 2007 at 12:31 am
I’ve been wondering a lot about facebook, too. On the one hand, I can see how social networks like facebook and myspace could replace blogging 1.0. It’s pretty meaty food for thought.
On the other hand, Jason Calacanis recently declared “facebook bankruptcy” after getting over 900 friend requests in a single day.
As the old Chinese curse says: May you live in interesting times…
By the way, facebook is how I found about your blog, which I like, and to which I have just subscribed.
Corrie || Apr 8, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Good post. I’ve been working to build a presence on MySpace, but it seems that for the past several months, many of the folks in my social circles have been talking more about Facebook. This may not be accurate, but it seems that MySpace is embraced more by high school kids and Facebook is becoming more popular with college crowds.
Leave a Comment