Facebook today unveiled more details for their monetization program called Facebook Credits. With over 200 million players engaged in greater than 10,000 game apps on Facebook, the potential for this new universal currency on Facebook is huge.
“You may not believe me when I say this,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. “We are doing it for developers. But it’s not a revenue opportunity anytime soon. Ads are a very good business.”
“With Credits, it becomes easier for people to buy things across apps. Rather than being locked into one app that has their credit card, they can buy in any app,” he continued. “This is a canonical economics example where it makes sense to have a standard and have just one, or a few, and that ends up being better for everyone. There is a lot of overhead for us doing this ourselves. It s a lot of hard work. We don t expect it to be profitable for a period of time.”
“We built this with the user in mind,” said Facebook Credits manager Deb Liu. “The mental hurdle of moving to pay for something is high. You take out your credit card, enter the information, and then buy something in FarmVille. The next day, you play another game. If you want to buy something, you do all of that again. Imagine Facebook Credits as more like a euro, which makes it easy to spend money across countries.”
The hope is that by making Facebook Credit more available, users will be more willing to spend money. There will also be rewards deals, such as when users buy credit with a Chase card. Users can by the credit using a credit card, PayPal, mobile payments and special advertising offers.
Facebook also said it can help developers out with an auto-top system that refills a person’s virtual wallet if it falls below a certain point, and users are shown to be more likely to buy if they have money in their wallet. Also, certain regional gambling laws will make it illegal to trade Facebook Credits for money or sell it second hand.
Source: VentureBeat {link no longer active}
