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| The Social Web Economy: Developers Posted: 11 Aug 2008 11:12 AM CDT This is a continuation in the series on "The Social Web Economy“ “Developers, Developers, Developers!” This is probably one of the best known quotes of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Many people may find him crazy for the way he speaks about developers in the video that I’ve included below, but he’s right. Not just in the social web economy but in the digital economy, developers are some of the most important people. They produce the products and services that consumers use on the web. When the social web was transformed overnight by the launch of the Facebook platform last year, many developers had mini-empires practically overnight. Whether it was individual developers or small teams of developers, these individuals now had businesses with relatively sizable revenue that they had to run. At f8 a couple weeks ago you could walk around the room and see how the passing of one year had impacted many of these developers. Some had been acquired, others continued to go it alone. Those that decided to go it alone are now being pushed to their limits and realizing the challenges of trying to grow a small business on a global scale. The key takeaway is that developers for the most part are not businesspeople. While they may have the entrepreneurial spirit that burns in many of us, they are best suited at building the programs that we all have grown to love (or sometimes hate). What is the source of developer tension? While developers have tension resulting from numerous sources (bugs in their applications, tight deadlines, etc), in the social web economy, the primary source of developer tension is the platforms. When a platform decides to revamp their entire system, or make sudden changes resulting from user feedback or malevolent actions by another developer, the rest of developers are impacted. On the Facebook platform the result was developers waking up at 3 am to fix their no longer functioning applications. Occasionally teams of developers worked around the clock in response to complaints from Facebook about terms of service violations. While mature platforms don't impact the developers as significantly, there will always be tension between the two parties. Next post in series: “The Social Web Economy: Entrepreneur Leaders”
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| iPhone Applications: Close to Half A Billion Dollar Industry Posted: 11 Aug 2008 09:18 AM CDT
Compare that to social platforms where all the money is generated through advertising revenue. While all that may change with the launch of a Facebook payment platform, the creation of a sizable industry overnight will most definitely attract new developers. It will also definitely attract competing platforms. Google is still rumored to be launching the Gphone but one report has said that the phone launch could be delayed to next year. According to mocoNews, “Starting this fall, T-Mobile USA will take the extraordinary step of ditching its traditional deck on the phone and replacing it with a platform that's open to almost any developer”. You can also guarantee that Microsoft is not just going to remain idle while Apple creates an entire industry. The result is that we are about to witness the mobile platform wars since as Steve Jobs states, “the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.” It has only been a little over a month since the iPhone launched but it appears to be living up to the hype and doing what was expected: transforming the mobile industry. |
| Will MySpace Surpass the Mighty Facebook Platform? Posted: 11 Aug 2008 08:00 AM CDT
All we have left to go on is the last total install data that Adonomics provides on their site. According to Adonomics the top MySpace application has over 6.7 million installs whereas the top application on Facebook has more than 46 million. This is the last we’ll ever know about the top number of users a Facebook application has but it’s clear that MySpace is still a fraction of Facebook when it comes to application installs. How about when it comes to Facebook monetization? According to Alley Insider, Offerpal Media (who is also a sponsor of Social Ad Summit) has been paying developers around $75 per 1,000 daily active users on MySpace and Facebook and $150-$200 for “higher engagement” applications. MySpace is generating about the same amount. So how much does this break down to for CPMs? No idea because there is no measure of what “high engagement” amounts to on Facebook or MySpace. Both sites are known for having an extremely high number of pageviews and as such this could amount to $0.75 or $75 CPMs. Chances are good that it’s much closer to the former estimate. While some developers are rumored to be generating over $1 million a month on Facebook, the majority are not generating that much off of a single application. It’s great to see that applications across multiple platforms are monetizing equally, but overall the industry needs to figure out a way to increase the overall CPMs. |
Apple knew they had a big opportunity on their hands when they released the iTunes application store for iPhones and the iPod touch. How big the opportunity was exactly nobody really knew. Today, the Wall Street Journal 
The MySpace platform has long-been a secondary platform for application developers. The primary reason is that most MySpace applications fail to attract as many users as they do on Facebook. Unfortunately there is no longer any way to determine the total number of users that have ever installed an application on Facebook and as such it will no longer be possible to do an effective comparison of what sites are more effective based on public data.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner |
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