Facebook platform developers could see $500M in revenue this year

Back of the envelope calculations are fun. I think a typical app will make $1-$10 (ad based vs. virtual currency based) per month for each 1000 monthly active users. Let's say about 20% of apps are virtual currency based, so $2.8. The top 20 apps on facebook have total 179M active users, so they would make $6M per year. If the top 20 accounts for 50% of traffic, that would pin total Facebook app earnings to $12M/year.

If I recall correctly, Joel has once said that the cost of office space accounts for something like 6% of their revenue. At another time I think he mentioned their new office costs $50000/month, so their revenue would be $10M/year.

So Fog Creek software makes as much as all apps on Facebook combined?-)

Edit: Read the article. Even Zynga alone seems to be making more than my whole estimate. Oopsie.

I finally figured it out.

When reading headlines,

s/could/won't/g

and

s/\?$/? No./g

In other news Microsoft employees could see Linus Torvalds around campus in Redmond attending Windows 7 Evangelist training.