Friday, February 11, 2011

Facebook gets serious - no fun for developers

Facebook is changing their Facebook platform policy. The changes have big impact in Facebook revenue and on 3rd parties developing Facebook apps and content.
Just a few days ago FB announced that in the future all in app payments for virtual goods must be paid via FB credits. This gives FB a piece of all transactions (30%).

Then Facebook moved the tabs away from middle of the page and are now links in the left hand navigation which made it harder for companies to place ads.

But now (starting 2.28.2010) companies are not anymore able to place their own ads on any datebook page. All ads needs to go through Facebook or Facebook approved companies, this means FB will make on each ad 30% revenue share.
Facebook as well forced developers not anymore to use flash to make FB mobile ready. All lot of heavy played games created their own mobile version and FB lost a lot of their traffic.



Furthermore to save in the long term money, everybody has to host their apps now in their own server and bind them through iframes. Which saves FB some server space. Facebook has already one of the biggest server farms in the US and recognized it can't scale if it host all files. I bet next step is that users are limited to post photos or documents or have to pay for more than 5 Gigabyte of stored data.

Right now all optimization in terms of costs and revenue is target against companies and not consumer, however the biggest piece of the cake are consumers with over 90% of traffic and server space.

All these steps are a clear sign that Facebook wants to increase the revenue and reduce the costs for hardware.

A snapshot from their new policy:
Advertisements and Cross-Promotions
1. You must not include advertisements or promotions, cross-promote other applications, or provide web search functionality in content distributed through Facebook social channels.
2. You can only utilize advertising or similar monetization related products or services from companies that appear on this list within Apps on Facebook.com (effective February 28, 2011).

Facebook is growing up and preparing to be a successful company with the potential to generate a lot of revenue. We will hope the changes will not pay in a negative way for FB. Because we should not forget, that all these extra apps made FB big and any change which is negative to the app developers can be fatal.

At least FB is smart enough to partner with their biggest app developers like Zynga and ad agencies.

See a list of approved companies for advertising:

We hope that by providing this list of companies that have acknowledged their commitment to advertising quality that we can all foster a better user experience.

Note: If a company you wish to work with is not on this list please direct them to the terms linked to above.

ad:C media
Ad4Game
AdJug
Adknowledge - (Cubics and Super Rewards)
ADTELLIGENCE
Applifier
APP Prizes
appssavvy
Bizmey
Blue Noodle
Casale Media
CPX Interactive
DoubleDing
Fox Networks
Httpool
IndieClick
Lifestreet Media
Live Gamer
MakeMeReach
MATOMY
Mediastay
MediaWhiz
One iota
Paymentwall
Peanut Labs
PubMatic
RadiumOne
RockYou
Rubicon Project
Smowtion
Sometrics
SponsorPay
SupersonicAds
SVnetwork
Tapjoy
tmpSocial
TokenAds
TrialPay
Underdog Media
ValueClick
WildTangent
XTEND
Ybrant Digital

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