SocialMedia, one of the leading advertising platforms for social network applications, announced today that they’ve paid out over $8 million to developers since the platform’s launch last year.
The majority of this revenue has gone out to Facebook app developers, but the platform also supports applications running on OpenSocial. The money has been paid out to approximately 1000 developers that have used SocialMedia’s ad platform across 5000 applications (the money has not been evenly distributed, so it isn’t worthwhile to look at the average).
These figures may be encouraging to critics of Facebook’s development platform, who worry that applications can’t be easily monetized. During a talk at the Web 2.0 conference last April, members of an expert panel were predicting total revenues on the Facebook platform of as little as $10M this year - an amount that certainly wouldn’t be encouraging to the venture capital firms that have been pouring millions into some of these apps.
Around 20% of Facebook’s 29,000 applications have used SocialMedia to distribute ads (and contributed to the $8M total). While this is impressive, it only represents a fraction of the total revenue that’s being generated - clearly, there’s far more than $10 million to be had on these still-fledgling development platforms.
Later this month SocialMedia will be holding a pair of Facebook “Business Schools” (one in New York, one in London) to help encourage growth on the platform.
Not bad.
Overall it looks like a smart move from SocialMedia’s part. They are taking a piece of the action on the Facebook platform, and the model could easily be expanded to encompass other platforms in the future.
I love the idea of Facebook applications, I just hate that they are all so full of fluff and altogether useless.
If RockYou and Slide started making *useful* apps instead of cheesy apps, i’d be way more impressed.
SocialMedia has done really well. I hope they can continue to be successful in such a highly competitive market…
That’s not that much money per app, in fact weak. Whats the deal now days? Seems like the billion dollar companies don’t want to share the wealth.
I meant to say that’s not much money per developer.
Social Media… great company… check this out http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog
Ya Nod Bad
My contribution to this post:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=127
We are also out in the market educating folks working hard to help developers along - http://www.smbizschool.com/
Social advertising is going to be huge in the near future…
More and more companies are trying find ways to innovate and being social is just the tip of the iceberg. There are much room to be explored and real solutions to be desired. Keep looking at this exciting space.
Warmest,
Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com
SocialMedia.com traffic is absolute crap, I don’t care what you are advertising, none of the traffic converts well. 99% of the clicks are accidental since they are usually users thinking the ad itself is either some kind of navigation or application related link.
You’d be lucky to get 0.2% conversions from SocialMedia’s rubbish traffic, advertisers be warned!
they sell most of their ads to other developers trying to gain installs. No *real* advertisers.
There whole business is help developers spend what little funding they have. And basically giving it to larger developers
Not sustainable
hey #13—you are wrong. the install days are way over—their placing clients are primarily consumer brands—like new hulk movie. they guys kick butt on their overfunded competition
I call bullshit.
PayPerPost to entice coders to develop for fakebook.
JerkCrunch is right . This is total b.s. there is no way SocialMedia has paid that out. I can’t believe TechCrunch doesn’t even have a healthy level of skepticism for bullshit press releases. What will it believe next? YouTube and Facebook turn a gigantic profit?
Social Media’s numbers are completely realistic and speak to overall size and opportunity for the Facebook application ecosystem. At my company Lookery, another social media oriented ad network, we’ll pay out more then $4 million and serve more then 40 billion impressions across hundreds of apps this year.
Based on our estimate, with an overall volume of 25 billion impressions per month, the Facebook platform has creating an ecosystem where apps are creating some large, engaging audiences and tens of millions of dollars of revenue.
@ 17 Todd - Please stop kidding me. You’re also someone with an incentive to lie and exaggerate.
You will pay out over $4 MM this year? You’re a freaking startup. Your projections could be way off. Even Facebook and LinkedIn lie on their projected sales.
Please stop insulting our intelligence.
Your industry sucks and you haven’t and won’t figure out a great way to monetize eyeballs. Grow up.
@Yawn why don’t you tell us what ax you’ve got to grind here since for those of us who spend time analyzing this space, understand these numbers to be very realistic. While some of the early advertising revenue that many of these social ad networks were generating was coming fm developers, if you’ve kept up w/this space at all, you’d know that there have been several other types of advertisers playing for some time now, and brand advertisers are now jumping in in a big way.
As for lying, dude get over yourself. The damage from getting caught telling an unnecessary lie over revenues far outweighs the benefits that come from putting a press release like this out there. Come to think of it, who cares if you believe it or not?
What missing from this analysis is that Social Media ads are largely a closed system. That is apps advertising on other apps. Since Social Media takes a cut, for that $8 million paid out, $10 million was probably paid in by apps. The average app is spending money on ads, not making money from them.
Has anyone here been paid by them? Lets see some doctored checks!