According to Alexa, iLike has lost 70% of their Web site traffic since launching on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

According to Alexa, iLike has lost 70% of their Web site traffic since launching on Facebook

plentyoffish.wordpress.com

19 pointstoffer12 comments

They've traded their independence and have become a sharecropper. :( They're now on Facebook's mercy. Facebook giveth; facebook taketh away?! Their investors should be worried.

Makes sense. None of my nontechie friends realise that facebook apps exist outside of facebook. For example they think Twitter is some kind of useless clone of facebook status. I've yet to see a great facebook app that ads value to facebook.

Would you exchange 4 million new users in one month for decline in Alexa ranking? Hell yeah!

iLike traffic actually shares the same exponential growth since all contents in their facebook app are served from their servers. Facebok does not host your app.

What's interesting is that all the hype surrounding the explosive viral growth for Facebook apps such as iLike doesn't acknowledge a possible cost. Acquiring 4 million users isn't strictly additive, if it comes at the cost of cannibalizing your existing Web site visitors.

At first, I thought that iLike would only be able to monetize their Facebook users by driving them to their Web site. So, a big drop in Web site traffic seemed disastrous.

However, I see now that iLike is showing ads on their "Music Challenge" page within their Facebook app, so driving traffic doesn't seem necessary. (I'm assuming iLike is collecting this advertising revenue. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

That's the real question then: How easy is it to monetize Facebook users? Is a Facebook user (who never visits the iLike Web site) just as valuable to iLike as a Web site user? If a Facebook user is less valuable, how many more Facebook users than Web site users would iLike need to come out ahead?

If you don't trust Facebook, then build a Facebook app with limited functionality to promote your full-featured service outside Facebook.

Aren't you then leaving room for a competitor to be more generous by letting users stay inside Facebook?

Why is that so important? Why does it matter if you sometimes need to leave Facebook?

I think given two otherwise similar services the one that's fully functional inside Facebook will get more users.

Unless the other one already has a lot more users.

It's the integration with your friends network and newsfeed that makes it so powerful.

with the new f8 platform, are you required to "host" your app with facebook in order to integrate with friends and news feed?

conceivably one could still require the user to go off-site to get the full benefit of the app, and still take advantage of facebook friendslist/newsfeed features.

You're not required to host your application with facebook

Infact, Facebook does not host any outside applications.

'Hosting' your application on the Facebook platform can be as simple sticking it in an iframe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com