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El siguiente artículo compara 2 grandes compañías como mypace y facebook desde el punto del desarrollo de aplicaciones. El articulo analiza casos de exito y errores en el desarrollo de las aplicaciones en facebook, tips para crear aplicaciones exitosas y una mirada a la importancia de las redes sociales.
Actualmente en facebook existen varias formas con las cuales podemos hacer negocio:
1. Venta de Pauta en facebook
2. Desarrollo de aplicaciones para las marcas
3. Desarrollo de aplicaciones libres en facebook
4. Administración de grupos para las marcas
5. Venta de productos en facebook
Cómo crees tú que la empresa podría aprovechar estas oportunidades y conseguir rendimientos sostenibles a partir de éste nuevo nicho de mercado?
Lee el artículo para que comprendas mejor el negocio!
The No. 2 social network is fast evolving into a new kind of software platform - and the race is on to figure out how to turn users' every move into dollars for enterprising developers.
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.
The servers - those digital canaries in the mine shaft - crashed, and crashed again. "It was crazy," Shen says. "We were down 17 of the first 30 days." Then it got worse. With traffic peaking at 1.5 million users, server costs topped $20,000 a month. And there was no way to monetize their creation.
Still, they soldiered on for more than a year, keeping afloat with tens of thousands of dollars in loans while hoping to figure out a way to turn their enormous fan base into a brilliant business. It never happened - at least not on MySpace.
This spring, however, Shen and Tokuda spent a few days porting their MySpace hit over to Facebook. The upstart social network began as a hangout for high school and college students and last September allowed anyone to join.
Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications. Which is exactly what Shen and Tokuda did when they rewrote their app and let it loose on Facebook.
Two months later, the duo had generated more than $200,000 in ad revenue. By late July they had 14 other apps up and running, with more than 22 million users. "When we started, we had no idea what we were doing," Shen says. "Now we have a whole suite of applications, and that's where our power is."
It's an increasingly common tale as the Facebook economy picks up steam. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. While a possible Facebook IPO or acquisition could change things overnight, for the moment it's a free-for-all.
One venture capital firm, Sand Hill Road-based Bay Partners, has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications. "The current apps only scratch the surface of what is possible," says Salil Deshpande, a partner at the firm. "We're looking for much more sophisticated applications that can make money."
Money time for social media
Developers like Shen have already proven how to use Facebook - and other social networks - to pull in a mass audience. But figuring out how to profit from those viral applications is another matter. So far, most of the revenue from Facebook apps comes from fairly primitive forms of advertising, such as Google (Charts, Fortune 500) AdSense. Yet a few developers are building applications to sell real and virtual goods. And others think they'll be able to charge major brands for access to the highly targeted Facebook crowds they've started to assemble. "We intend to build a giant company on top of these social operating systems," says Slide CEO Max Levchin, who's already made one fortune as a co-founder of PayPal. His startup specializes in photo slide shows that pull in more than 129 million users a month. "It's an opportunity for all of us to build the next Electronic Arts, Intuit, or Adobe."
"Right now, social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg told the assembled entrepreneurs. "Today we are going to end that." That day Facebook began allowing programmers like Shen to build as many apps for Facebook's 32 million users as they could dream up - and to pocket whatever money they made doing it, with Facebook providing access to both the audience and the programming tools needed to draw them in.
Zuckerberg has turned the MySpace business model upside down: Not only is he giving developers their own real estate within Facebook - both inside users' profile pages and on piggybacked application pages - but he's allowing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct purchases of services and merchandise. For example, download iLike, an app that lets you sample and purchase music, and the developer gets a 5 percent kickback if you end up buying songs from iTunes or Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500).
Josh Kopelman, a Philadelphia-based venture capitalist and investor in such startups as LinkedIn and Yapta, sees more users coming Facebook's way (ComScore reports Facebook grew 270 percent last year, while MySpace grew 72 percent) - and even more developers. "If you were a venture-backed Web startup," Kopelman says, "and had to decide whether to focus on a site that welcomed you in and let you keep 100 percent of the revenue you generate, vs. a site with a vague policy that doesn't let you generate any revenue, it's not even a decision. It's an IQ test."
Armed with those sorts of insights, some startups are positioning themselves as Facebook app factories. "Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social," says Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia, a small shop in Mill Valley, Calif., that's already turned out such Facebook hits as FoodFight (throw a virtual lobster at your buddy) and Happyhour (send that buddy a cocktail). How does he plan to cash in on all those widgets?
At the moment, advertising opportunities are unproven - which is why Goldstein is leaning toward sponsorship as a simpler path to profits. FoodFight, Goldstein says, is an ideal mechanism for food companies to market themselves. Instead of throwing a chicken drumstick at a friend, a user could throw, say, a drumstick sponsored by Tyson Foods. "I had an ad agency representing a buffalo wings chain approach us with an $80,000 ad buy," Goldstein says. "It's starting to happen."
Shen and Tokuda's outfit, meanwhile, has become a lot more than a slide show. The company, now called RockYou, has more than $10 million in venture funding, more than a dozen developers, and one of the largest portfolios of applications. Its 15 apps include Horoscopes, Emote (icons for your status box), and Glitter Text (sparkly fonts). This time around, the revenue model is getting as much attention as the code. In late July the startup launched its own advertising network: RockYou is offering its user base and Facebook pages as a way for advertisers and other developers to reach more users. "We don't know which approach is going to work best yet," Shen says, "so we're trying them all."
Four ways to make money
1: Sell ads
Just about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audiences will earn serious money. Several easy-to-use ad networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.(See "Tools," below.)
Apps currently generate less than $1 for every 1,000 pageviews. But that amount will likely increase as demographic targeting becomes more refined and the ad models move from simply racking up pageviews to measuring users' engagement.
Tricks of the trade
1. Establish your base. Hold off on serving ads until you have at least 10,000 users. Bombarding users with too much advertising can scare them away and hurt your growth in the long run.
2. Test different ad networks. Putting up ads is a simple cut-and-paste operation, so you can afford to be choosy and pick the network that gives you the best deal.
3. Don't clutter up app pages. "This is definitely a challenge for developers," says Mark Kantor, one of three developers behind Graffiti. "The most important thing is to preserve user experience."
4. Renegotiate as you grow. Demand a bigger cut of the revenue share as your traffic jumps. Says Kantor, "It might be better to go with a small ad network if you think you'll stand out."
Tools
Dozens of ad networks are cropping up to serve the Facebook developers. Here are a few.
1. Lookery (lookery.com). This new Facebook-specific ad network aims to offer developers demographic profiles of their user bases. More targeted advertising could soon fetch a higher price.
2. Userplane (userplane.com). AOL-owned Userplane pays per minute of exposure rather than just per pageview, so it's good for applications like games that keep users highly engaged.
3. Google AdSense. Not new, but many developers consider it the best means of supplying relevant ads.
2: Attract sponsors
Advertisers are already sponsoring apps. Besides being widely used, your application needs to offer companies a natural way to interact with their customers.
Building direct relationships with brands takes more time and effort, but it means higher-quality advertising and more control over how your users interact with it. Expect to earn multiple-dollar CPMs instead of the pocket change you'd get from the ad networks.
Tricks of the trade
1. Don't pitch big brands without big numbers. You'll need a large traffic base - at least a few million users - before top brands will pay attention.
2. Know who's looking at your pages and why. Analyze your user demographics so you can pitch your audience effectively to sponsors.(See "Tools," below.)
3. Let your users do the work. Incorporate brands that your users identify with, and they'll willingly spread the word.
4. Don't overdo it. Too much brand presence will scare away Facebook's sometimes advertising-averse audience.
Tools
Where to find help analyzing your traffic and users.
1. Google Analytics. Embedding Analytics into your apps is easy, and it churns out useful stats about where users are coming from.
2. Gigya (gigya.com). This startup tracks metrics like app stickiness and user adoption rates.
3. Appaholic (appaholic.com). This site tracks traffic growth by the hour, day, or week - critical when launching a new ad campaign.
3: Sell services
As apps become more about utility and less about fun, opportunities will arise to sell digital services of lasting value to users. Eventually, they'll make purchases without leaving their profiles.
If you're selling a real service, then you can have your cake and eat it too- try selling subscriptions and ads to double-dip on your traffic.
Tricks of the trade
1. Start with a free version. And make switching to a paid offering an easy process. Don't force users to leave Facebook to sign up.
2. Set logical limits. Decide carefully what you'll give for free and what you won't. And even the freebies must be valuable enough for customers to be willing to spend their time.
3. Research your price points. Box.net already had storage plans for businesses and professionals. But when it moved onto Facebook, the company rethought its pricing models and created a $25-per-year plan that's comparable to the cost of an external flash drive - the way most college students store important files.
4. Be tactful and timely. Box.net alerts its users when they're nearing their file or storage size limits, politely reminding them about its for-pay premium service.
Tools
Where to find a platform to process payments.
1. PayPal. A starter plan will cost you 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.
2. Google Checkout. The standard processing fee is 2 percent plus 20 cents per transaction.
3. Facebook. The company is rumored to be launching its own payment platform soon.
4: Sell products
As Facebook increasingly becomes the center of people's digital lives, it's also becoming a venue for selling things - digital and otherwise - to its fast-growing audience.
Most developers are going the affiliate route, offering product wish lists and then sending users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Others, however, are directly selling such items as ringtones and T-shirts.
Tricks of the trade
1. Be a middleman. iLike makes its music-sampling apps simple and hands off sales to iTunes or Amazon via affiliate partnerships. Those directly selling hard goods need to prepare for the complexity of payment and delivery.
2. Keep it simple. Facebook has not yet become a place where people are likely to buy, say, a digital camera. But users are starting to purchase items that don't break the bank and extend Facebook's utility. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is looking to sell ringtones and wallpaper on Facebook via custom storefront widgets. "We don't want to bring people to the store," says XLR8 Mobile CEO Perry Tell. "We prefer to bring the store to the people."
3. Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get there is by offering free samples. Whether it's a digital download of a song or the image of an item, give your customers a taste of what they'll get before asking them to commit.
4. Don't rule out the odd. "Sometimes wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge," Tell says. "Everyone is looking for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be willing to try lots of things."
Tools
1. Clearspring Technologies. This analytics service tracks exactly who's downloading an app and what they're buying through it. It also suggests when to double down on an item or sales approach that is working or, conversely, kill off those that aren't.
2. Garage Sale. Developers can use this Facebook shopping cart system run by Buy.com, which takes a 5 percent cut of sales.
3. Facebook Marketplace. The largest classified-ads community on the network, it's a good place to monitor buying trends.
Información importante que involucra a nuestra negocio, esta noticia la publico el colombiano el 11 de febrero del 2008.
