Facebook is a very valuable thing. When facebook opened themselves up I never thought it would work. When they opened it up beyond Colleges, i thought it would fail too. I was wrong. Facebook has become the operating system for the internet. All they need is a powerful email system and a social search engine and they will own google and everyone else. Sure, they don't have much revenue but that's fixable.

lately i've gotten involved with the Shoes! Application that has 200,000 rapid woman's shoes fans and growing rapidly. The app allows you to gift people shoes! and put it in your virtual closet. Now the app is showing by 8,000 new people per day. We did $91 in gross revenue today, our best day yet. We are however about to implement a number of monetization techniques that i think will pay off big. Now, Facebook is a marketing platform for people and if you are trying to build apps as a business you really should just be using facebook as your marketing platform so that you can own the customer yourself.

What we are doing is the following:
1) Building a real website that interfaces with fcbk app
2) Collecting email addresses of our users and we are going to market to them using old fashioned list management techniques and by creating newsletters a la daily candy.
3) Exploring the use of coregistrations when people first join in a very limited fashion
4) Working with spreadshirts to sell custom tshirts
5) Charging people for sending paid gifts
6) Allowing people to buy real shoes via affiliate links
7) General advertising rotation (we are working with Altura and Lee Lorsenson initially to grow our ad revenues) Currently this is where all of our revenue is coming from.
8) Acebucks and incentive systems allowing users to take surveys for points

All in all there are a lot of ways to make money on facebook. In general you can earn .50-1.50 CPM for rotating ads within the site. Beyond that, we feel that traditional tactics will work best like email lists and coreg and incentive systems. Incentive systems have failed elsewhere but because it is so new to facebook we think it could make a lot of money in the short term.

Why email? People don't like buying expensive shit via social networks. The concept of social shopping is too new and confusing. However, people buy shit off of email all the time. Email is a super effective way to sell shit therefore we will be using it. We also can engage with our users and push content to them daily and remind them of our service. Most apps on facebook like at the app as an end all in itself when in truth an app on fcbk is just the starting point for leveraging their users for ourselves.