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.
While SocialMedia declined to name the company in question, it confirmed that it was not one of the large social application developers like Playfish, SGN, and Zynga who have raised large funding rounds and have been rumored to pull in over $1 million a month.
The news reaffirms Facebook’s position alongside the iPhone as a place to get rich quick (at least for a lucky few). SocialMedia also notes that it has several other independent clients who are making over $100,000 a month. Of course, such results are uncommon, but no more so than they are on the App Store.
Also worth noting is that these revenues are entirely based on advertising, while most of the success stories we’ve heard on the App Store have been from premium apps. Facebook isn’t likely to unveil its own premium apps any time soon, but if it ever gets around to launching the payment platform it announced last year, these success stories will probably become far more common.
Yeah, I really need to learn how to code…NOW!
w3schools.com
Good lookin out, SVD…
yeah that will be great to learn
http://sw.tEarn.com/ to choose among the 200 software platforms that you can integrate.
yes i wish i would have been one of the developers
Now developers can target ads country-wise and age-wise using facebook tag fb:restricted-to. Displaying ads only in US, UK and Canada where net speed is high would be good option.
Btw, everytime I enter techcrunch.com I get an error that your site can flush the SOL files of Flash Player
might want to check on that (MacOSX, Flash Player 10)
Who are these (very prolific) developers? Links?
Exactly. TC claims that “SocialMedia declined to name the company in question,” but also seems to mention specifics about the company in question. What’s going on here? Assumption and exaggeration are not signs of quality journalism and proper ethical practices.
They gave us details but didn’t name the company. Where’s the assumption and exaggeration?
Considering it’s a bunch of indie developers, it’s quite possible the company doesn’t have a name:P
might want to look into youplusplus.com ….
Would you want SocialMedia sharing your stats with the public? I wouldn’t.
@charlie …. yeah it’s definitely worth it, and the barrier to entry is really small. If it works, good for you – maybe get some VC financing … else move on to the next app. (This applies to both Facebook Apps and iPhone). But for iPhone you need to initially invest in a MacBook.
@Jason: Great Post …. keeps the developers motivated
I’m actually typing this reply on my MacBook…so that’s not a problem. ;D
This is exactly why I finally invested in a Macbook and stuck with the switch – even though I personally don’t like OSX. So I wonder how much the App Store is driving sales of Macbooks?
We’re using a Mac Mini and JavaScript, didn’t have to invest in a Macbook. Wouldn’t mind getting one as soon as that first $700k rolls in though… ! Anyone know of good sales stats sites?
the actual figures are much bigger. if it is any of the apps you mention, they should make more than $1M from advertising alone. i can tell that by projecting revenue from my apps to their user base size. Socialmedia pays the least of all social ad networks, plus these companies also run pay-to-play offers.
It’s certainly not me either. We have 50+ apps with SocialMedia and we’re lucky if we make $1000 a month.
Might want to invest in some new apps..lol 50 wow..that is a lot..
I just saw your company’s site… pogostick.com right?
you’re a web company and your product page says “Coming soon” ???
you’re lucky if you guys pull in TEN dollars a month!
Wow, makes me want to pull an all nighter with this Facebook app I am developing.
Btw, everytime I enter techcrunch.com I get an error that your site can flush the SOL files of Flash Player
might want to check on that (MacOSX, Flash Player 10)
My employer just cut everybody’s salaries by a massive amount, and is asking people to voluntarily leave.
I’m almost ready to make Facebook apps again for companies. Almost.
The people and VC I talked to are all about mobile though. So that’s where I’m concentrating my efforts.
If you want to see large groups of normally highly intelligent people truly scared sh1tless, you should come down to LA and Silicon Valley right now and visit some tech companies.
“The 6 figure income earner’s guide to first time homelessness” (tips and tricks)
Best selling title 2009.
The internet will decline simply from people having to sell them on ebay and losing internet access due to lapsing their road runner bill. LOL. viva IT.
Who are you talking to?
“If you want to see large groups of normally highly intelligent people truly scared sh1tless”
What makes them “normally highly intelligent” If what we see in IT industry can be considered a high intelligence, then that is why we see high school students or college drop-outs can do seemingly amazing things in IT industries but we don’t see large number of them in physics or biology or any other areas? Is that because computer is so complicated which require a highly intelligent people but other fields are so simple that no one has any interest on them?
Come on people! Wake up! It is because majority of IT industry is so simple it requires in fact less intelligence and less knowledge.
This endless bragging about IT people is non-sense. It is not a good sign for future progress. I think when technical awareness spans a lot of people this non-sense will become obsolete.
$700,000/month is really a lot! I wonder how they have managed to achieve that. Being an iPhone developer is also another “quick-rich” idea which most people would love to have! I wonder what’s next…
And by some you mean like 3. Way to throw up another sensationalist title.
This just story just absolutely INSPIRED me! I love it that these guys are making obscene amounts of money. It proves to me all over again that the American dream is alive and well and kickin’ (butt)!
I love this country!
Pretty soon they’ll have more money than Citibank!
literally.
Just to pick nits, $700K divided by a “handful of developers” is less than $700K per developer as suggested by the title. Still, $140K/month (handful = 5?) is nothing to sneeze at.
Would be interesting to see the stats for app revenue as a whole. From what I’ve heard, a few apps receive the lion’s share of traffic, and hence of ad revenue. Might help calibrate the expectation of folks who think they can get rich quick by building yet another Facebook (or iPhone) app.
Its called Powerlaw distribution[1].
Only few people make a lot of money on it. Most people make only little compared to the top.
Thats with all the AppStore/Facebook/Whatever stories. You also here more about the exceptions than the “standard”. Which means, that somebody who makes $700k a month with an app gets a story, but not the thousands of developers that only make $100 or $1k/month.
[1] http://en.wikip...aw_distribution
Thanks. I’m familiar with power laws / scale-free distributions–they’re a stable of social network theory. But the constants matter. All the more reason that I’d like to see numbers, not just theory and speculation.
We need a war, like right now. WWII did a good job boosting the economy. Bring Bush back and let him run free with our army.
Perhaps he can steer our troops towards Ottawa and finish off what we started with the American revolution.
Every comment on this thread is right on. These are bent numbers and this Facebook promo is TC fodder.
I’m afraid it’s all circular and you don’t have to go back far to figure out that a war, is actually what’s coming next; no tin foil hat needed, just a history book.
Your political babble is boring.
There are facebook apps making more than this, but they’re not using social media.
The only facebook app I’d pay for is an ‘app-blocker’. Sort of like a pop-up blocker for apps.
The only worthwhile app I’ve used was Scrabulous, which was later taken down for trademark infringement.
Facebook apps have been a fad and a hinderance to users. In contrast, the Apple App store has released much more valuable applications. I have paid for iPhone apps, I’d NEVER pay a dime for Facebook apps (in their current form). Would you pay to spam your friends or get spammed yourself?
Each time an article like this surfaces it inspires a million people to flood the market with apps in the hope that they will strike it rich. It’s like trying to win the lottery or selling a screenplay for a million bucks. Probably no different than anything else… be creative and make something really cool and try to cash in before the copycats make money off your idea first. lol
Hmmm that’s great – but we see affiliates running offers from the CPA networks who are making $500,000 a WEEK running affiliate offers across search and display advertising, at 40%-50% margins. And of course they all copy each other pretty quickly.
Right, and as we speak, Steve Jobs is making $500,000/minute.
We’re comparing to other facebook developers here.
And there are facebook devs who are big time affiliates too. It’s like a big happy family.
Ha ha. Tickle me Elmo.
Isn’t SocialMedia still inhaling mold at pier 39 over at the SF south beach?
Nice pay for an indie.
Ok facebook makes zero money but their developers are getting rich. Either this is a fake PR play or Facebook is just a freakin dumb ass company t sit still and let all these “indie”, “rogue” developers cash in.
How much does Facebook’s PR company pay TC to push these silly stories? It has just gottent ut of control…no great independent journalism on the web anymore. It’s all fake crap.
Well, Facebook did post $200mm+ in earnings a ways back despite being focused on “user growth” versus monetization.
If they can pull $200mm+ (something like $700k/day) when they’re not paying attention to money, just imagine what they can do when they are.
G.F you are wrong. What imagination? Facebook is already five years old and they don’t have any successful model to monetize. As they could not make it till now, they will never achieve it. I think finally Microsoft or Google will buy it. Let Google buy it because MS is a dumb.
I think the thing I pull from articles like this is inspiration. It may not be probable that the average programmer can hit it big with a Facebook app nor anything else for that matter, especially because their just that… average, but it proves it is possible and that’s all I need to experience a resurgence of hope and excitement.
One of the things always mentioned in every startup article is that the excitement wanes and a successful entrepreneur must be in it for the long haul and find inspiration along the way to keep him motivated. This article provides just that.
Unfortunately, you can also compare the inspiration and energy provided by articles like this to a candy bar… sugar rush that lasts an hour. I’ll take it, though.
Brian has a point.
While the rest of the world is falling apart around us (lehman, aig, gm) this is a sign that there is still hope and opportunity in unlikely places.
To be honest, I hope these guys can overtake the “big dogs” who have risen tens of millions of dollars.
Not because I don’t like the “big dogs” because they are all great companies and I hope they succeed too. It’s more that, these indie developers are showing it’s possible for those who don’t have big shot connections, or massive amounts of money in the bank can still make ends meet.
Just because we can’t all nab $40 million in funding, doesn’t mean we should all stop innovating and pursuing our dreams (even if it does mean we have to keep our day jobs while doing it).
Advertising will decline sharply as “the world continues “falling apart around us”.
All the more reason to be impressed by a bunch of indie devs making $700k during the fourth quarter (where online advertising supposedly dropped quite a bit for Google/Yahoo/etc.)
Maybe they should have made much more during good times.
there really money in the internet.
http://www.heal...tedirectory.com
I wonder how much their server costs are, if any. sure, everyone has a cool idea, but can you put into a marketable app/product? 90% cant.
probably not much, at most 10% of revenue? you can get an unimaginable amount of hardware these days for $70 grand per month. all these guys have crazy margins
Nice start, now let’s start talking about the real story. How much are these companies paying to acquire users? Just because it’s fb doesn’t mean the traffic is free.
I write about the business of online dating and cover companies like Zoosk and SNAP. Go look at SNAP’s Are You Interested app. It’s larger than most top-10 dating sites. AYI is pulling in $800k each quarter on a *single* app.
Pay attention to the companies that didn’t have to raise money to build out their presence on fb.
Facebook basically killed off the major app market with last summer’s redesign. Ask how difficult it is to get even 5 million installs today.
Then start asking about how fb apps are like iPhone apps, people install, try and forget.
If the goal of fb app developers is to expose people to junk untargeted advertising, then they are successful, much to my chagrin.
Impressive.
The internet is still the wild west and there is plenty of money to be made by enterprising folks.
This is absolutely incredible and good to hear! I had a friend develop and app for Facebook but doesn’t make that type of cheese. We have some other pretty cool ones in the works, though..
@MatthewLoop
Hm mm … and just think – some people in Metro-Detroit are hanging on to wanting to keep their auto company jobs. Sad!
Interestingly enough, if the State of Michigan can position itself to become “Hollywood Midwest” – I wonder why they haven’t figured out that it could also be positioned to become “Sili-Mo” (Silicon Valley-Motown).
You either “get it” or you don’t.
Guess they’re too bummed out to think straight.
Carlo sadly you are so right. Been bashing my head against this problem for many years, it is a long slow hard grind.
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This article is a re-write of the famous 5 drivers from NY to Washington DC story.
Take a bunch of people in NY give them Lamborghini cars to go to Washington DC.
then interviewed the first 5 drivers in Washington, they will tells you that they were driving at 150 Mph, out running the high patrol and so on
Have you find a new way to go from NY to Washington DC ?
No because you don’t account all the failures, the crashes the one that were arrested, and so on …
Jason these “big money hype” stories are always far too incomplete, suggesting they are misleading or even just false.
1) Do you think a marketing firm might be hyping client success? Of course they do,
2) What is developer failure rate. Pointing only to success stories tells us nothing about average expected returns, which may be low.
3) Revenue vs profit. Did they advertise these aps? Facebook rev shares? How much did that cost? Anybody can “make” a million easily by spending two million, but they will soon go broke.
1) Probably
2) Developer failure rate is high. There are tens of thousands of apps in the facebook product directory, and probably even more developers. Say there are 100,000 developers, and only 5 of them are in this group. That’s an enormous failure rate.
3) Considering these are “indie” developers, unless they started out crazy rich (and trust me, most crazy rich people don’t make facebook apps sans funding) I highly doubt they spent $2 million to make $1 million. The only companies I can see doing that are the heavily funded ones, who are spending other people’s money.
I would guess that you do have a good point, in that the story could be an exaggeration. I would disagree with the third point, given that these are indie developers, which means that if they spent 2 million to make 1 million, they lost 1 million of their own money.
I doubt a couple of facebook developers would have 1 million to spare, nor do I think they could get that kind of credit without appearing on techcrunch in a funding event.
In terms of your second point, I don’t think the article was implying that “anyone” can do it.
This is great news as it supports the visionary dreams of entrepreneurs. Opportunities like this show that innovative always wins out. Jason, these guys aren’t “the lucky few”, as you state. They are smart guys who’ve identified an itch and have scratched it.
Now that everyone has wet their panties, what’s the larger story here? Well no doubt the example cited is Social Media’s largest indie producer (pointless to cite someone in the middle of the pack). So knowing that a small number of apps are able to leverage huge portions of Facebook’s user base, that means FB will have an even more difficult time monetizing than anyone thought. A few prolific apps dominate FBs entire user base and are only able to generate a few million a month collectively. Keep in mind that FB apps are now at the fever pitch level of faddishness, which is unsustainable. FB is about two years behind the monetization curve of Myspace (which s now on a accelerating downward trend). FB is in the prime time of popularity right now. They are not even close to monetizing well. In two years their decline will become apparent to everyone. Last week I saw Marc Andreesen tell Charlie Rose that FB could make $1 Billion a year right now if they chose to monetize aggressively. Obviously he’s basing that assumption on Myspace’s revenues. However, Myspace makes the bulk of their earnings on professional content through leveraging Newscorp’s other assets. FB doesn’t have anything close to that. Their user growth curve is flattening and no longer measured in multiples, but in fractions. It should be evident to people in this industry, knowing what has been proven about the low dollar density if social advertising that they are nearing the end of the runway with wings that have failed to produce lift. There is only one way things like this end. It will undoubtedly be spectacular.
Facebook traffic is in no way “flattening out.” Make sure to zoom out to “max view” when viewing their traffic curves on alexa/compete/quantcast. It’s just getting into the start of the hockey stick.
Where is the 3rd party verification on these claims? I have a really hard time believing this story. Especially if it’s based only on Ad revenue.
I mean really do you know how many, as the Rock says – MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people have to be using an application or site to generate $700,000 a month? There’s no critical analysis here, just this ad network says “we have a company making $700,000.” I’m not saying they are lying, but it doesn’t smell right. Now there is the caveat that this is across multiple apps, so that could be why. But then that’s a heck of a lot of apps (I’m thinking 20, 30, 40 or more) for “prolific” developers.
Put it in perspective, sites like Facebook and Twitter which gets hundreds of millions of unique traffic a month can’t make money. The avg CPM is less than 20 or 30 cents (I’m basing this only on the ad networks I’ve dealt with and eventually canceled. I do have one that’s paying me $4 per, but that’s really high and not the norm). Even the top iPhone apps don’t generate hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue and these are actually paid apps. We only have the word of the Advertising company to prove this story.
With that said it is truly inspiring and now I’m like, do I want to learn iPhone or Facebook development? I’ll probably try and do both
Michelle Alexandria
EclipseMagazine.com
I agree with Michelle. The first thing I did was get out my calculator and figured at .20 CPM this would be 3.5 Billion ad views a month.
That represents some 1 Billion users. It’s hard to make things ad up. It’s possible but very unlikely. Somebody got an extra zero or two written down in the interview.
Steve
Probably lolapps at http://www.lolapps.com.
Calling them profilic is a stretch, more like lucky.
I don’t think they use social media
This is definitely a joke..
The Facebook platform is oversaturated with too many applications and with Facebook clamping down on restrictions left and right, the platform just isn’t viral like it used to be.
Everyone is doing iPhone now..
I can’t remember the last time I used a facebook app, let alone spent money on it.
All these FB App stories are straight BS.
Do you spend money on google when you use it? No, you don’t. But you make them money when you click on their ads.
LOL! Apps developers rule.
Everytime one of these big profits Facebook app stories is posted anywhere they never have the actual app name itself.
This and the others like it are complete BS.
Nothing new here. This model is being used by affiliate marketers/facebook developers for more than year. Once you have an app or partnership with a developer that is getting millions of hits on their app, then you just need to load those apps with offers from any affiliate network. Mobile offers work best on social networks. Payouts is between $4 to $7. I’ve know of people who make $30,000 a day on social networks through advertising.
I don’t understand why people having hard time believing this story. If you’re in the online marketing world, you know how much is possible.
I’m a small time marketer. When I small, I mean really really small comparing to some big fish out there. I generate over $17k a month with my online marketing business working only part-time. I’ve full time job as well.
My friends doing this full time are generating over $50k in profits a month.
Hi, I am from Kenya and I’d like to advertise for some of the local companies here on facebook. I want to put up ads in facebook for people in the East African region and charge the companies a monthly fee. Is this posible. I will make payments to facebook for the ad and charge the companies a fee to have their ads appear whenever someone in the region logs on. Any advice on the way forward. Please respond to my email address-wmunyambu@gmail.com. Cheers.
Wow.. are Social Media Marketing apps that much in demand? Wow! Facebook doesn’t even generate profit.. do they?
Everytime one of these big profits Facebook app stories is posted anywhere they never have the actual app name itself.
$700K to develop social media apps! wow.
Its really great news. Every developers now have to work hard to get their facebook applications on top level. Great information. Thanks