Techcrunch reports a group of indie facebook developers making $700k per month. They got this information from socialmedia, a social ad network.
The mass media may be enamored of the rags-to-riches stories of developers on Apple’s App Store, but it isn’t the only game in town for indie developers to strike it rich. We’ve gotten word from SocialMedia, a popular ad platform for social network applications, that one of the company’s clients pulled in over $700,000 in advertising revenues from their Facebook apps in December alone. Granted, this was spread over 30+ of the client’s applications, but the company only consists of a handful of (very prolific) developers.
They don’t name the company or the developers. If they have 30+ applications with so many users it should be very easy to identify them. Also, I don’t see why this company/developers would want to be so secretive about their identity. Publicity should help them get more users. This information is given out by a company (socialmedia) with a vested interest. So I call BS on this until they identify this group and the applications making such money. Advertising rates on social networks are abysmally low. Assuming $0.10 cpm, they would need 7 billion page views a month. That is a lot of page views for an anonymous group of facebook apps. If this were true it would be very easy to fugure out who they are. So I don’t buy it.
Agreed, agreed, agreed.
Comment by Lukas Bradley — March 7, 2009 @ 6:55 am
You are wrong on pretty much every count. I have first hand information that those numbers are about right.
“If they have 30+ applications with so many users it should be very easy to identify them.”
- There are around 10x as many applications outside of the app directory as there are inside. Some of the largest applications are apps that techies have never heard of.
“Publicity should help them get more users.”
- You obviously have no idea how Facebook applications acquire users. Publicity is not even a drop in the bucket for our purposes.
“Advertising rates on social networks are abysmally low. Assuming $0.10 cpm, they would need 7 billion page views a month.”
- It is possible to get CPMs in the range of dollars with the right niche.
Comment by Insider Developer — March 7, 2009 @ 11:06 am
I would be glad to be wrong as we sure can use some positive news in these dark days. However the story would be more credible if people knew what this group is and what these apps are. I don’t see why being secretive is more helpful than getting more publicity. Perhaps they are concerned that others may copy their apps or their business models? This doesn’t make sense as they should have a lot of users to make $700K so thieir apps are not exactly flying under the radar. In any case, if this is really true then my congrats to them.
Comment by Raja — March 7, 2009 @ 4:29 pm
I call Bull**** too on this. $700,000? Well, if so congrats, but I would like to see the books for myself.
Comment by Paul — March 9, 2009 @ 7:05 am
I’m very skeptical of this as well. The “we want to keep it a secret” factor makes it a little harder to digest, but I know there are a lot of people making good money. I think this may be embellished a little but maybe not completely false.
Comment by California Will — August 28, 2009 @ 12:33 pm