So, as of my latest perusal of facebook’s usage statistics (as per Zuckerberg’s f8 speech), the number of daily returning users is “24 million and growing, 24 million and growing…” < If you read that last phrase out loud, it may have sounded like something Zuckerberg said in his f8 speech. Indeed, it may sound very funny! But, I believe quite strongly that this phrase is actually profound enough to be repeated twice, in fact thrice, four times, and maybe as many times as possible, till it rings clearly. This is not just another rant, so please read on…
Although I cannot claim to be a marketing guru, a sales professional, or a visionary of the future, one thing should seem fairly obvious to anyone, as it does to me. That is, if even a small percentage of these returning visitors had even the slightest real reason to pull out their credit card, debit card, or paypal account information, they would. It is no secret that more than 50% of the current facebook demographic are out of college (source: http://static.ak.facebook.com/press/facebook_statistics.pdf). Why do so many people insist that these are poor college students and that their buying power is not high enough to justify real apps? That is such bull$%#@! As soon as someone finds a business case for these users, and stops thinking about how to make the next widget, I will personally pull out my credit card/debit card (linked to dwindling bank account — ahhh, the joy of being a startup founder), and enter the 16 digits, followed by the expiration date, and the security code. And, please, don’t tell me, you (if you are a facebook user) won’t do the same, when faced with a facebook app that actually does something useful.
Alex Notov has been writing code since the age 10. He is a web application developer since the age of 17. Now 23, he is managing editor at Startupism.com, and Chief Geek (he isn’t a fan of formal titles) and co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup.
July 16th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
This is pretty spot on. I’ve heard from more than one person in the web community complaining about how tough it is to sell to the Facebook demographic, how low their attention span is, how overhyped the platform is, etc etc. These criticisms are short sighted in my opinion.
The real problem with Facebook right now is that there isn’t anything to buy on Facebook, so of course they aren’t buying. There are a lot of crappy widgets and not a lot of good applications, so of course you have churn. These are product problems, not demographic problems. I’d bet my bottom dollar that there are at least a few dozen companies working to attack this very moment, right when the blowback is screaming “overhyped!”
In any case, even assuming all of the above is true about the Facebook demographic, it would be premature for any company to dismiss Facebook with “The facebook demographic doesn’t do such and such.” The right question is “How MUCH of the Facebook demo DOES do such and such”, and is that a large enough market for my business?
In most cases, I think the answer is probably yes.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I think the adoption of any monetized Facebook features will take a while, mainly because Facebook still has the glow of a free, useful social tool. I can imagine them getting this right, and I can imagine them failing miserably by clouding up their fairly clean interface and featureset with brazenly money-grabbing apps and schemes.
And now, we can begin the countdown until long-time Facebook users are copmlaining about the good old days when Facebook didn’t want their money and it was free… a refrain that I’ve seen on a web site I was personally involved with many years ago. (Possibly more on that later - it was a pre-Web 2.0 music sharing and review site that never quite caught on and ran out of money… and is facing a relaunch and closed beta right now after four years of downtime.)
I can imagine them making a lot of money without alienating their users through micro-transaction features, possibly including the goofy kind of features that the Something Awful Forums use to raise a extra money in small chunks - like buying somebody an insulting custom title or paying for a cheap banner ad promoting a nonsense product or idea or linking back to a profile or discussion within the site.
Then again, I can also imagine a barrage of flirtatious gifting of profile accessories to sorority girls by overeager males with a few disposable bucks and the bizarre expectation that buying a girl a 16X16-pixel gif of a rose will get you a free walk to second base.
I’m not sure how much money that feature makes Hot or Not and other personals sites, but I’m sure eventually we’ll see a ‘Getting Rich Via Microtransactions for Dummies’ book on shelves soon. Or maybe they’ll sell it online in chapters for two dollars each.