Facebook is a famously difficult place to make money. Despite the popularity of the social network, most ads go for pennies per thousand impressions (CPMs). Even Social Media, a Facebook ad network that is able to get effective CPMs of about 50 cents, has only paid out a little more than $8 million total to application developers since it launched a year ago. Yet AllFacebook claims:
There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is.
Excuse me? Actually, it does matter who this mystery million-dollar-a-month Facebook developer is. Facebook apps that make real money are few and far between. It is important for anyone creating such apps to know which models work and which ones don’t. Nick O’Neil at AllFacebook should understand why his readers would want that information, even if his sources would rather that he keep it to himself. It is also important to know who it is in order to try to test the claim.
As it so happens, I’ve heard this million-dollar-a-month claim before. It came from Anu Shukla, the CEO of Offerpal Media, a lead generation network for Facebook apps that gives users a way to earn virtual currency by looking at an ad and completing an action (such as filling out a registration form). O’Neil also points to Offerpal in his post, noting that it can generate average CPMs of $75, with some as high as $200,
When I interviewed Shukla earlier this summer, she told me that about 200 apps on Facebook and elsewhere are tying their virtual currency to Offerpal and that “there are publishers earning up to $1 million a month with a single app.” She also said that 80 percent of the top 25 apps on Facebook are using Offerpal.
Friends For Sale! is one of them. This app lets you “buy and sell your friends as pets” and includes a virtual gift shop as well. It boasts 4.5 million monthly active users, making it one of the biggest apps on Facebook.
Could it be the million-dollar app? I don’t know for sure (Shukla wouldn’t say—if you have a better guess tell me why in comments). But let’s run some numbers and see if it makes sense. While Offerpal’s CPMs are high, Shukla said that only a small fraction of any given app’s users—typically only 5 to 10 percent of active users—will look at Offerpal’s CPA ads.
So let’s be generous here and assume that 10 percent of the people who play with Friends for Sale engage with an Offerpal ad (450,000). Let’s give it a $100 CPM and multiply that by a generous ten pageviews per month per user. That would be 450,000 X $100/1,000 X 10 = $450,000. You’d have to really stretch that to get to $1 million a month. But a $200 CPM or more than 20 pageviews per month would get you close. So would expanding Offerpal’s reach to a larger percentage of the app’s active users (after all, the whole point of the app is to buy and sell “pet” friends and virtual gifts).
That’s within the realm of possibility. Just barely. I guess some people will do anything for money, even if it’s not real.
Of the 200 social networking apps that tap into the Offerpal network, Shukla told me the median app was collecting $150,000 a month in revenues. That suggests that Offerpal is paying out more per month to developers than the $8 million Social Media has paid out over the past year.
It also suggests that creating a virtual economy inside Facebook could be more lucrative than plastering it with generic ads.
Update: Another strong contender for the million-dollar app is Mob Wars (2.5 million active monthly users, we’ve heard from several sources, as has VentureBeat, which explains:
In the game, a would-be mafioso starts off as a petty thief and must work his way to the top of the crime chain, earning points by fighting opposing gangsters, doing jobs, robbing stores and casinos and exploiting underlings. The player can improve his character by spending these points on better guns, real estate, loyalty and more, and while he could spend an eternity building up enough points to become a serious baller, he can also spend real cash to jumpstart the process.
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Oh, this is sooo sweet – I wonder how long it would take when mighty FB comes along!
It’s not FFS. Someone w/ less DAU (of MAU), but better monetization.
1M is not possible with new layout, ppl started clicking on apps they appeared on the home pages, now no one cares them…even facebook doesn’t care them
if anyone made 1M that is as good as it can get…..iphone apps strategy is better than fb apps…there is clear pricing model in iphone apps
I never thought people might be really wasting their real money by buying those FFS coins. Never thought FFS might be making millions!
what’s facebook?
It is a website where intelligent people make money and time wasters make friends..
How about Zynga? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/FOcoEQIl1F_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”How about Zynga? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/eMQFu3CUX8″}}}
I really like Loic! He is so great! Hope to meet you in Paris!
Love his accent!!
So virtual currency becomes a must for a fb dev like me.. fb tos restricts apps from blocking few features of app, for invites.
Or we can make an app feature available only if some “action” is performed. Dont worry, CPAs will come down sooner than expected
It’s not Friends For Sale. Most devs know which app it is though:P
I can certainly vouch for that as well.
http://www.deve...om/hotlists.php
Check the monetization section:P
Did you really link to some content behind a pay wall? You are a total schmuck.
geez, just like the allfacebook douche: “I know which apps make the most $, nanny nanny boo boo”
ugh
I agree.
Not everything on the internet can be free.
It’s a well kept secret for a reason.
If you want free, go download stuff off of BitComet, or play a Facebook app. If you want information that is the result of heavily invested resources and research by individuals who need to make a living, hit up Developer Analytics, or Forrester, or whoever else.
People have to get off this “information should be free, or stolen” mentality. It’s creating too much of a self righteous belief that you should be able to get everything you want by paying Comcast $40/month.
Charles, people should get off this “Comments are open, I think I’ll spam them with links to my proprietary data”. Great marketing program.
Keep your info subscription based, but just don’t spam comments sections with your links. Get it?
@Gavin
Actually no, people shouldn’t:) *bow*
Oh right, I forgot the typical, obligatory “put my link in a comment on techcrunch to get random clickthroughs”
http://www.deve...eranalytics.com
Sheesh, you TC people:P
God, I actually feel sorry for you man. Your that pathetic.
All those apps are corny as hell;)
是的，我不能～
i second that
LOL, it’s all smoke and mirrors. I suggest that no-one is making that kind of money, nor does anyone “know”. The lack of suggestions clearly indicates that no-one knows as they don’t want to have their posts held up for ridicule in the future.
Yeah, but what if it was possible?!
Maybe the WidgetLabs story is catching peoples’ imaginations.
fools
For once, you TechCrunch guys are clueless! It’s obvious to me which FB app makes a lot of money. It’s fluff(Friends)! Don’t you know how fanatic the core fluff-Friends users are? They’re effin addicts who spend hours every day petting for virtual “munny.” But a lot also take the easy way out and just buy/sell/trade tons of stuff in fluff Gold, which costs 10 cents each.
Michael and Erick, get a fluff(Friend)! Nick O’Neill and everybody else has a fluff(Pet).
As an example, look at this video (referenced in the original AllFacebook post, wasn’t that a big-enough hint?):
http://www.yout...h?v=Xn7EAb5wAtc
Skip to the 40 second mark, where you’ll see two Unicorns talking, a pink one and a blue one. Assuming the video creator didn’t merely borrow or win them in a contest, do you know approximately how much the pink one cost the user? 3000 gold or $300. And the blue one? 6500 gold or $650. So just to get those two animal drawings, at least $950 was traded between users at some point. The (fluff)Friends developer made an easy 4% out of each transaction. All for a bunch of pixels!
Let me explain a little more about how many times the (fluff) Developer made money here:
So, the equivalent of 9500 gold plus a 4% “sales tax” was transacted (to simplify, approx. 10,000 gold or $1K in real world money). How was the buyer able to obtain 10,000 gold, and much did the (fluff) Developer get out of it? It could be a straight $1000, if he was lazy ass and just bought the virtual gold through PayPal (not OfferPal). Or, it could be zero if he gained them by petting other (fluff)Pets for virtual “munny” for hours and hours every day for weeks. If he did, at the current 50 munny-1 gold exchange rate, he would’ve had to have had 10000*50=500,000 munny. To gain that much munny by just petting (not through surveys and offers, which don’t get offered that often anyway), he would’ve had to pet 100,000 times. If you’re really fast, maybe you can pet every 6 seconds (there are special sites for this) and spend 600,000 seconds or approx 167 hours petting! Needless to say, some fluff Users actually do have enough time on their hands to do this — they’re that obsessed. But of course, most probably mix “hard-earned” gold with “bought” gold. So, let’s be conservative and say that of that 1000, only $700 was paid with “bought” gold. So the fluff Developer probably made $700 through Paypal, sweet!
Technically, it’s just a bunch of pixels. However, for these (fluff) addicts, it’s not just the innate “cuteness” but also the sense of appreciation and admiration from the (fluff)Community that hacing the latest pet or decoration/goods brings. You have to appreciate that the fluff developer constantly add new goods and add value to the application every month so that the core 100K or so active users will stay engaged.
I’d say it’s Casues.
And ofcourse it’s spelled “Causes”.
Congrats to the Fluff developers for not underestimating the depths of banality in humankind.
Wait…explain once again why it is a secret? As in, why the devs commenting above “know but won’t tell”…? Gawd, this early adopter tech community gets weirder by the blog post.
It’s a secret because the barrier to entry for Facebook apps is too low at this point in time.
I.E. if you work at Starbucks, and for some strange reason know PHP/MySQL, you could replicate the model in a matter of weeks.
In fact, there are about 11 copy cat apps to date, all of which are doing well, and half of which make ~double to triple the salary of a typical google engineer:P
So yeah, we “know but won’t tell.”
Also it amuses us to watch.
What an arrogant closer.
You need to take your “heavily invested resources” and get a marketing plan together.
Your attitude sucks, you’ve brought little insight into the conversation, and your silo’d data’s value is decreasing.
so they are all bored, can you help it. at least they are staying out of trouble.
99.9% of the apps are garbage, and they all run the same stupid ads…”you’ve got a crush”..
i can’t wait for the day fb stops all advertising in apps…or takes it over themselves.
In this video:
http://www.yout...h?v=t6vjKo6Lzg4
Jason Bailey talks about an app which made a million in a week, and names it….
I thought it was pretty lame and disgusting that the company mentioned was supposed to be supporting charity but obviously got a large slice of the profits.
$150 donated to charity for 1000 toolbar downloads but the guy in the video said the tool bar paid $0.80, doesn’t take a genius to work out that this company is hugely profiting from this.
As someone in the audience asked ‘How can I do this without selling my soul to the devil?’
‘How can I do this without selling my soul to the devil?’
Choose a charity with a lower overhead.
My vote is for “causes”.
APP style not good for web no people like it
http://www.cityquery.com?
I make a million dollar a month on facebook
wow. this is new info for me.
This is absolutely false. I own an app with a significant ammount of installs and am running offerpal and a very very very very very small percentage of users actually use the offerpal offers.
App is in the top 25 apps on Facebook in terms of active users.
Low engagement apps (lower impressions/unique user/day || less time/unique user/day) tend not to fare well under CPA.
Rawclix has worked well for me….I have 9 apps running on FB at the moment, and making very decent revenue.
how often does rawclix payout??
once a week.
I think http://www.shopit.com is a viable competitor in this space.
My guess is Facebook itself.
$100 and @00 CPMs? Why not $1 million CPMs? It makes just as much sense for a Facebook apps. I’ll also take the 10% CTR. My new numbers give Offerpal $8 billion a day and Bentleys in every color of the rainbow. And a pony. A flying pony.
I got a Facebook app (similar to FFS) with Offerpal inside. My app has 6,000 unique users per day on average and I make $1,000 per month with OfferPal + $1,000 with other ad networks. FFS has about 700,000 unique users per day… Thus I guess they make about $115,000-$125,000 with Offerpal, so a total of $230,000-$250,000 of revenues per month.
It doesn’t scale up quite linearly with size. FFS probably makes more along the lines of $170k-200k.
I thought 1 million was the square root of douche bag?
My guess is Texas Hold Em Poker by Zynga … there’s huge money for referrals in the poker world, and even if that app converts less than 1% a month they must be making good money.
In their wildest dreams they wouldn’t get anywhere close to 1% conversion rate.
Love it!
@ Eric. They are making $75-200 on CPA (cost per action), not on CPM. No one is going to pay 3 digits for CPM on a facebook app.
My main thought for this story though. Incentive based affiliate advertising is illegal amongst the big CPA networks like Commission Junction and Google Affiliate. With that in mind, does FFS’ business model seem like a sham, especially for the advertisers paying out these big CPA commissions?
If anyone has a thought on this, we’re polling over at tiny. click my name..
Hahaha… good one. I would like to know a CPA offer that would pay $75-200 a lead on FB traffic. Don’t make me laugh. You’d get shut down in no time for sending bad leads.
I’m the marketing director here at Offerpal, and I can tell you that the “claim” is definitely true. In fact, as Anu said, there are multiple apps making that much. I wish we could tell you which ones but of course we’re held to a strict confidentiality agreement, as are our partners. The bottom line is that when you embed advertising into the user experience as deeply as it is on these social apps and support it with our powerful optimization engine, targeting capabilities and proprietary technology, the revenue potential is remarkable.
I’d also like to clarify a point about our average payouts. Our network pays out on average about $75 per day for every 1,000 DAUs, with some high engagement apps performing much better. Note that this is different from eCPM. It’s also important to note that our network has grown significantly since Anu last spoke to TC – we’re now at close to 400 applications across not just FB but all major social networks, plus many niche- and second-tier social nets.
Does Facebook even make 1 million a month
lol.
It’s not clear that the revenue is generated from user actions as opposed to data acquisition. I would think that there’s a lot of data that the music industry would pay for to understand user activity on iLike for example.
It’s not Friends for Sale for sure. I know- but I am not telling
This is is the funniest and most entertaining comment stream on TC- EVER.
haha, for serious:P *gets popcorn*
Charles Yong – you are so wrong!!
Just sayin’ it how it is. Actually, it’s somewhat amusing. I think every single fb developer who’s posted so far knows exactly what’s going on:P
Statistically, you’d think that by now at least the name of the app in question would have been mentioned in passing by now, but clearly a lot more people than I thought are out of the loop:P
I’m a coward here so shoot me. Matt @ Offerpal plugs his company well with the canned response. These claims are not true and let’s leave it at that.
Hello All,
I’m one of the developers of (fluff) Friends, and I’m happy to see that there’s such a spirited discussion going on involving (fluff)Friends!
I think Randy Vinluan probably made the case for (fluff)Friends’ value better than I ever could. Our users are dedicated to our application because it’s truly a social experience. The game itself has the whole adopt-a-virtual-pet theme with petting and feeding, plus head-to-head racing and betting on races, plus rare items and collecting sets of decorations, plus user-generated art complete with a deviantart.com style rating system, plus contests, plus the Limited Edition Shop (to facilitate trading), plus … well you get the idea. And then over on our forums (http://fluff-fr...ends.com/forum/), our users have essentially extended our gameplay by creating petting zoos, gift bombing clubs, user-submitted fluffs and items, racing clubs, etc. In short, it’s a fun, immersive virtual world that has quite a few ways for you to play the game, all of which are very social – which is the whole point of being a Facebook application in the first place.
As was noted, we allow players to earn gold by doing Offerpal surveys, but our income from Offerpal is dwarfed by income from people paying to play the game. So we’re going to continue concentrating our efforts supporting the following maxim: people pay for that which they value.
If (fluff)Friends sounds interesting to you, and you’re a developer, shoot me an email (graham at fluff-friends dot com). We’re always looking to add talent to our team. It’s a great opportunity to work on a proven commodity that has hundreds of thousands of loyal fans.
the question is not WHO is making that kind of money, but HOW. as someone in the main demographic, i can tell you that it is not advertising dollars. the ads are just too rubbish to have any real impact.
besides… facebook is complete void of relevance now that Scrabulous is gone
Go kiddies – try making iphone and facebook apps. Waste your life away. One or two of you will win the lottery and the rest of you will look like fools.
wow… y’all are blind…
read this and you will know why shervin (CEO of SGN) commented and said he knows who it is…
http://ventureb...-belong-to-sgn/
No one is making a million bucks a month off their app. They may be wasting a million, but not making it. Take that to the bank.
thank you , Facebook offers a tremendous opportunity for those who are looking forward to earn money online. A lot of people in the past few years have earned a lot through Facebook applications by just using some simple strategies; the most important and vital one being making their Facebook applications viral and focused.
Most of you guys on here are not asking the real question, HOW CAN YOU MAKE A MILLION A MONTH USING THESE APPS. The truth of the matter is all of you guys are right, even the pessimistic ones. If you believe it can be done it can, and if you believe it can’t be done it can’t, either way you are right (Henry Ford). If it wasn’t true facebook would not be worth billions. I’m going to set the record straight, I’ve made about 600,000.00 on facebook for three consecutive months and I’m currently making millions per month doing other simple things on the internet. In the begining I was online all day every day learning my system but now I’m online about twice a week. Sometimes you just have to ask the right question instead of the wrong question. I don’t care if you believe my post, I’m not trying to sell you anything, sign you up for something, I just thought I would speak truth to some of the guys that wonder if it’s possible to make this kind of money. Oh, to all the non believers keep on not believing and discrediting with no actual facts but to the people who have aspirations to make this happen, one thing, believe and stay focused. Peace
Tell me your secret….
Most of you guys on here are not asking the real question, HOW CAN YOU MAKE A MILLION A MONTH USING THESE APPS. The truth of the matter is all of you guys are right, even the pessimistic ones. If you believe it can be done it can, and if you believe it can’t be done it can’t, either way you are right (Henry Ford). If it wasn’t true facebook would not be worth billions. I’m going to set the record straight, I’ve made about 600,000.00 on facebook for three consecutive months and I’m currently making millions per month doing other simple things on the internet. In the begining I was online all day every day learning my system but now I’m online about twice a week. Sometimes you just have to ask the right question instead of the wrong question. I don’t care if you believe my post, I’m not trying to sell you anything, sign you up for something, I just thought I would speak truth to some of the guys that wonder if it’s possible to make this kind of money. Oh, to all the non believers keep on not believing and discrediting with no actual facts but to the people who have aspirations to make this happen, one thing, believe and stay focused. Peace
LOL! These comments are just full of comedians. Keep it up bigboy, next thing you know you will be bailing out the banks from your trailler.