Facebook’s Advertising Advantage

One of the reasons why the Facebook application platform has taken off so quickly is because developers who create applications on Facebook are free to include advertisements in the application page views they create. A popular application on Facebook which monetizes those views appropriately can expect to make a tidy profit, and this has been one of the driving forces behind the gold-rush like wave of initial applications on the platform.

Here are a couple of screenshots from a Facebook app called Scrabulous to illustrate my point:

Applications created via the OpenSocial APIs on the other hand can exist in many different social networks, and each of these may not be as open as Facebook with respect to advertising. So while it’s certainly correct to suggest that OpenSocial is a boon for Facebook developers because they can, without much effort, double or triple the number of potential users of their apps, there’s no guarantee that these users can be shown advertisements in the same way they can via Facebook.

I think an import addition to the OpenSocial API on it’s way to a version 1.0 is the ability for an application to know whether advertising is permitted as part of the generated application space. Until that happens, Facebook’s smaller user base may still be a more attractive prospect for some app developers.