Developer news
Sharing Your Best Practices for Making Money on Facebook Platform

We launched Facebook Platform to give you the opportunity to create innovative new experiences for our users, and with that gave you the flexibility to monetize those experiences in the ways you best saw fit.

Since launch we've seen many of your applications grow from brand new applications with zero users to businesses with tens to hundreds of thousands or even millions of monthly users. And as applications have grown, we've been excited to witness so many of you building real businesses based on your users' engagement and earning significant amounts of revenue via numerous models including advertising, sponsorships, and charging users for your (or related) services.

Given that so many of you have great tips and information, we're adding a few new pages to our Developer site and wiki to help you more easily share your best practices, ideas, and tips with each other around building your businesses:

  • A brief overview of how to think about building a business, and commonly found business models on Facebook Platform
  • A list of providers who can help you, including: ad networks, payment providers, and analytics companies
  • Some interesting articles written by bloggers and the press

We encourage you to contribute to these wiki pages, as well as write your own stories, tips, suggestions, and articles. We will select some of the most interesting and invite you to write guest blog posts on our blog. If you have other topics you would like for us to explore or other things to share with us directly (but not publicly on the wiki) please submit them to our Developer Help page under the category "Monetization Tips."

Finally, we are always internally exploring different ways we can directly help you monetize better. Starting today you may notice a few applications occasionally serving Facebook Ads directly in their canvas pages as a part of a small alpha test. We will use the results of this test and other tests that we do to determine the best ways we can help you monetize. For this initial test we picked a few developers that had a variety of different user bases and application types to give us the kind of data we need. We will examine the results to decide whether to open up the program to more developers in the future.

We're excited about the growing number of monetization options using Facebook Platform, and we look forward to working together with you to build more successful businesses with applications on Facebook or Facebook Connect on your websites in 2009. We welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum.