Monetization Best Practices
From Facebook Developers Wiki
Facebook Platform Best Practices: Monetizing Your Application
With Facebook Platform, you have the freedom to monetize your application as you like. Here are just a few of the monetization strategies we’ve already seen to be successful.
- Advertising: this generally amounts to delivering advertising impressions to users engaged with your application canvas pages. The model is simple, and so are Facebook's rules:
- Your application, including any embedded advertising, can’t contain any adult content or illegal content, gambling, promotion or sale of alcohol / tobacco / firearms, or generate spam.
- Your application cannot place any advertising on a user's profile page.
You can find more specific details in the Facebook Platform Applications Guidelines, part of the Facebook Developer Terms of Service.
- Partnering with brand advertisers: You can work directly with a brand advertiser to incorporate sponsored elements inside your application or even build a full branded application.
- Commission / subscription fees: Some application developers collect a commission or transaction fee on activities such as e-commerce or transferring money, or a subscription fee for content or access to functionality.
- Using your application for cross-promotion: If your application has access to a large number of users, other application developers may want to embed advertising content for their own application inside yours.
- External investment: And, of course, there’s investment from third parties, whether seed funding or full venture capital funding. The funding market is starting to heat up, and we’re excited to see Facebook applications successfully receive investments from external sources.
- Two of Facebook’s early investors, Accel and Founders Fund, have established fbFund, a grant program designed to encourage as many developers as possible to write innovative new Facebook applications and enable an even broader class of developers to become entrepreneurs. For more information or to apply for a grant, see the fbFund page.
