Navarr's Tech Side The Technical Side of my Life

1Nov/090

It’s Facebook’s Turn to Scratch OUR Back

imageQuite possibly one of the largest and most influential things pulling users to Facebook has always been the application platform.  It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and developers are doing everything they can to make money off the platform, including advertisements and resorting to sleazy scams like Offerpal and SuperRewards, all the while paying Facebook more and more money for advertising that, most of the time appears on other application’s sidebar.

Why has it taken us Developers this long to realize it?  Facebook is making a profit off of our applications and giving us absolutely nothing in return.  Not only are developers paying Facebook to get more users, but we’re giving them free advertising space and revenue.  It’s obviously time that Facebook started scratching the developer’s back by giving them some of the revenue off the advertisements that appear on their own application pages!  This would offer application developers a clean, non-scammy, non-shoddy revenue stream with advertisements that would always fit with the Facebook platform policy, without even disrupting the feel of the application.

Facebook is constantly complaining about the scammy and shoddy methods developers implement to try to make their application more viral to manage some form of income, but if Facebook just paid developers a percentage for the advertisements being placed on those same developer’s applications, than the entire Facebook experience would be cleaner and much more appealing to the end user.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?