I'm still clueless as to how anyone ever thought they'd be able to make any money writing annoying apps for a free platform targeted at kids and young adults with no money...
You would be surprised how many page views some of these apps get. Many of the apps were specially designed to promote page views and force the user to change page to do simple tasks. Anyways, I think the article is about right and that the buzz of the launch is long gone.. Unless you build something kick ass I don't think you can reach to top of the food chain anymore.
Page views is possibly the worst metric for this enterprise. Warbook had tons of page views, but it was designed to generate them. Scrabbulous on the other had had essentially one or two, but it's engagement was through the roof.
My apologies for being a brickhead, but how do page views turn into money for a Facebook app author?
I guess they were hoping to be bought out by Facebook? Or maybe some other big company wanting in on the Facebook pie. (Microsoft?)
In my mind, a facebook app would be part of a wider strategy, such as integrating your external service into facebook to drive additional use of the core service. It didn't seem like many facebook apps on their own made that much sense, especially for VCs. I mean, they basically allow you to spread your ads across a small portion of facebook's site. As a business model for a couple dudes, fine, but as a model to throw millions of bucks on, not so sure there. Unless VCs were hoping facebook would acquire them, which it doesn't need to to benefit from them, so why would it?
The deeper realization may be that simply plugging holes in Facebook's existing functionality is a short term place to be.
But I think that there's probably more sustainability in bringing things to Facebook that they won't themselves.