Why I stepped away from Facebook development | Hacker News Reader

Why I stepped away from Facebook development

aymeric.gaurat.net

7 pointshwijaya7 comments

The author makes a good point about dependency on another company. Having your side project or startup completely at the whim of another company is not a good business model.

Might be good for a quick dollar, but it's not sustainable.

It's a double-edged sword. The big advantage of the platform is leverage: you get to leverage their technology and their existing user base.

That's true. I suppose you just have to be willing to keep up with any changes they make to their TOS. For instance, Apple limiting the development languages on their new Iphone/Ipad/Itouch OS.

This has been ok for a year or so but in the last 6 months Facebook has introduced a lot of breaking changes (ie: removing the notifications, and stream.publish)

It is definitely easier to get traction quickly (especially if you target a growing market like France was when I started)

Interesting write up on the pros and cons of developing for a platform like Facebook.

Is there any information on how much money Facebook apps usually make? What are the earnings like on free apps that don’t charge subscriptions?

It is hard to answer this question, it really depends on the nature of your application and the mother tongue of your users.

Applications with english users tend to be much better paid than other languages.

But it is easier to be visible in a less crowded market like Indonesia, or the recently growing asian countries.

I remember that on my ads (targetting french users) I was getting an eCPM oscilating between $0.06 on a RPG game and $0.40 on a quizz application which is quite low in comparison to the english application standards.

It also depends on the ad network you use (some ad network performs better than others depending on your application).

There is no generic rule. You have to experiment all of them to see which one works better.

I was making 15000 euros per month with 50K users per day on a RPG game (as opposed to casual game) using various monetization strategy.

On a quizz application, with 1 million active users per day (20 millions page views) I reached $3000 a day without any direct partnership (simply by adding a basic ad from RockYou) with ads only

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