Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [16]
Other apps
There’s a whole underworld market of app developers selling each other installs, which can be a great way to line the pockets of developers who have popular apps while attracting lots of potentially interested users to your app. As you grow in popularity, you can earn a nice income by selling installs to other developers. Those installs work best when they’re between related apps, so try to think of places in your app where it would logically make sense to suggest another app. Then, scope out some apps that would benefit from advertising in those spaces.
Product placement
There are lots and lots of brands that are still trying to crack the Facebook nut. If you do a really good job of monitoring your Facebook Insights statistics for your app and know your demographic, you can carefully engineer places to insert products and get paid for it. Consider, as examples, Facebook’s own Gifts app and iLike, which are both excellent examples of product placement at work. Gifts recently included 250,000 free Indiana Jones fedoras to support the release of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Figure 2-5).
Figure 2-5. Facebook Gifts product placement
E-commerce
There hasn’t been a lot of success in this area, mostly because Facebook currently doesn’t offer developers a mechanism to accept payments through the site. You can create an integration to a third-party gateway such as PayPal or Google Checkout fairly easily, but users have shown some resistance both to leaving Facebook and to paying for things that have traditionally been free (as they are in most of the apps in the Facebook ecosystem). Facebook has announced that it will be offering a payment gateway service to developers, so it’s worth starting to plan out how you would take advantage of that.
Loss leader
Lots of apps on Facebook are extensions of off-Facebook brands or websites. Many of them are built on the premise that they can grab a chunk of the Facebook audience and gradually pull them into the off-Facebook site, where they can sell them upgraded accounts or show them more ads. This is a pretty solid idea, except that users on Facebook show a very strong resistance to leaving it. If you can figure out how to leverage their loyalty into upgrades to pay accounts without leaving the site, you might be on to something.
Guns for hire
If you’re a crack team of Facebook developers but aren’t big on ideas, don’t discard the avenue of getting paid to build apps for other people. There’s a lot of money out there in helping the world’s agencies and brands establish their foothold on Facebook, and many of them are desperately looking for reliable resources who they can call on as needed. You can start by listing yourself in the Facebook Marketplace, but if you don’t have a portfolio to call your own, you should get started on one. For those of you who are really pressed for ideas, consider finding a not-for-profit or charity whose work you dig and offer to build an app for them for free, provided they throw their marketing effort and budget behind building up users.
Google AdSense and Facebook
Problem
I’m using Google AdSense on my websites to run ads, and I really like the system. Can I use it inside Facebook?
Solution
You can, but it’s a little more complicated than just dropping your AdSense code into place. Facebook’s FBJS parser won’t allow straight JavaScript through without adding all kinds of funky namespace and sandbox security to your code, which prevents Google’s insertion script from working at all.
The generally accepted technique is to embed an fb:iframe tag in your Canvas page, which will load the AdSense ads inside your Canvas. Since AdSense works by selecting ads that are relevant to the content on the page, it’s important that you