Facebook announced that all games on Facebook must adopt Facebook Credits as a payment method by July 1st. And this is the signal that Facebook is utilizing its power to make revenue through Facebook Credits. The social games and commerce sites (so called ‘F commerce’) especially are rapidly growing and becoming more profitable.
According to the record of Facebakers, Facebook is closing in to 700 million users and is growing by expansion to developing countries such as Brazil and Indonesia. Now, Facebook is focused on inducing users from a new market. Although increasing new users is still the main strategy, Facebook may be interested in rolling plans to make profit. Facebook has endured its desire for profits and it is time to get a ripen result.
Even though Facebook Credits gets 30% for a processing fee, many social game companies appear to accept this fee structure without any big trouble. Because it is not easy to bill users with their own payment processing system for the reason that many users don’t trust individual billing system which is not known to public. Facebook is rather well known and trustworthy.
It is not easy to decide whether Facebook Credits will be the second PayPal in the near future. If the company doesn’t gear up the speed to monetize, it will have an opportunity to get enough revenues without any side-effect. Facebook should remind the mistake of Myspace which hung too many ads on its pages to satisfy users. Facebook needs to hear the voice of the market and monitor the response of its policy including Facebook Credits.
Ironically News Corp. agreed to sell Myspace to Specific Media LLC at USD 35 million in June 29. The price is only 6% of the acquired price 6 years ago. In the internet world, a small thing makes a big change.