App Developers Making $8,000 A Year

According to news posted on Techcruch, SocialMedia, the leading Facebook ad network, has paid out $8 million to developers over the past year. Divide that by the approximately 1,000 developers that are on their network and you get an average of $8,000 per developer. This isn’t a fair analysis though because revenue is clearly skewed toward those application with a higher number of active daily users.

According to Jason Kincaid, “during a talk at the Web 2.0 conference last April, members of an expert panel were predicting total revenues on the Facebook platform of as little as $10M this year.” While that estimate has been underestimated, there is no sign that the number is going to be substantially higher. Then again it would be difficult to predict how much is actually being generated considering the numerous ways that applications are currently being monetized.

There are virtual currencies and rewards programs that are generating revenue as well. The real questions about the revenue in this space are if this is sustainable and if it will continue to grow. Not even Facebook or MySpace have been able to generate massive revenues so it continues to be an industry wide issue. What creative solutions do you foresee for solving the monetization issue?

Disclosure: SocialMedia is a sponsor of my sites.

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