Facebook Application Revenue: 5.2 Million Users = Over $1.5M annual revenue
In January, SNAP Interactive, creators of the Facebook application “Are you Interested“, announced earnings of $388,000 USD for the quarter ending December 31st, 2007. For the quarter, the application had a total of 5.2 Million users and 500,000 daily active users. Read more at Mashable.
Also, check out Are You Interested’s Adonomics growth pattern here.
Opinion: In general, this kind of news represents the first wave of public news regarding significant Facebook revenue. We haven’t seen true targeted Social Ads, and when Facebook eventually gets around to making that happen, the revenues for a company with successful applications will increase. This will create a cycle where bigger advertisers realize they need to get involved, and the profits steadily increase. Eventually, a large company will launch an all out social marketing campaign, and assuming it succeeds, the entire market will direct its eyes on social marketing.
Furthermore, with the advanced Metrics that Facebook is developing, advertisers will quickly be able to see how an advertising dollar in Facebook hits all their target demographics and results in a great click-through rate. When they compare this to the ridiculous rates for a full-page ad in their municipal newspaper, we’ll see more and more money devoted to the targeted social advertising space.
The interesting thing, is that when you parse the Facebook statistics, the fastest growing market is above 35. The older generation is getting into social networking quicker than you’d expect, and since we are talking about the long play, I’d say most people are going to be surprised at how vital social networking becomes to people of all ages.
It was like when cellular phones had their limited corporate use, but slowly spread to become indispensable to daily life. I see social networking, in SOME way shape or form (look past FB), becoming a vital way to organize events, and manage memories, contacts, etc.
One cannot compare advertising in a newspaper to advertising on Facebook. Both ads will reach completely different demographics. While Facebook is a steadily growing network, it will never be used by the majority of an integral demographic – baby boomers. Although some baby boomers may have accounts, the majority do not. However, these baby boomers subscribe to daily newspapers; therefore, they are more likely to view an add in the Saturday paper than on Facebook. Print media may be declining, but that does not rule it out completely.
Isn’t the figures of Facebook users wrong being too low by far?
With net combined with TV online ads will be the whole deal in 5 years time.
It’s not clear that baby boomers will ignore Facebook or social networking in general.
Many 60-80 yearolds spend hours a day spamming each other with email today. In a few years, they may well graduate to social networking–the better to target their spam interests to kindred spirits around the globe.
The big difference between 20-somethings and the retired set is that a) they have lots of discretionary spending capability and b) they have little incentive to save it anymore.