A week ago we released the third Facebook application in our Starfleet Commander series, Starfleet Commander Universe 2. It’s essentially Starfleet Commander with a couple game play changes (mainly mine payouts are accelerated) and other than that it’s pretty much identical to the original. It was meant mainly to be a fresh new galaxy for users to start over. While we love the original universe, and will continue supporting it indefinitely, there are now players who have been playing for over a year, making it tough for newer players to compete.
Within a couple hours of launching we got an email saying:
Hi,
We take abuse on Platform very seriously, and our systems routinely screen for abusive applications receiving negative user feedback.
Starfleet Commander – Uni 2 has been permanently disabled, as our automated systems detected it was abusive and generating user complaints. Please read our Developer Principles and Policies at http://developers.facebook.com/policy for more information.
If your application was not abusive or generating user complaints, please visit the Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/help?page=431 for further assistance.
Thanks,
Facebook Platform Team
We were immediately freaking out. We knew the app wasn’t abusive as it was identical (as far as API usage goes) to the original, which we know has been vetted by Facebook on many occasions.
In the past Facebook has been great about letting us know if there was something that violated their platform terms. We’ve always tried to comply with every term, but there are so many of them, many subjective, and often seemingly not enforced at all, that it’s impossible for an app developer to not step over the line. But every time we’ve been contacted we’ve fixed the problem within hours, and every time Facebook has been pretty responsive about the whole thing. Until this time.
We filled out the contact forms which said that they would contact us back within 5 to 7 business days. (It’s been that long now, still nothing, for the record.) That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s potentially a very large amount of revenue to us lost while waiting for a reply that may never come.
First I tried emailing my contact in their ad department. We’ve spent a large sum (for us) in ads. Probably more than they pay our contact in a couple years. No response. We then tried talking to some people who work on the credits team that we had dealt with (we were one of the first apps to integrate that) but they were unable to accomplish much and gave up rather quickly, telling us the app couldn’t be restored, and nor could the one developer account that had gotten locked out and couldn’t get past the security question to restore.
Out of curiosity I did some calculations from looking at our Google Analytics page and plugging in some numbers from my days of buying users via Facebook ads. Assuming that ads targeting our customers cost about the same as the ads I bought to get many of them (it’s probably pretty close) they’re making about $0.54 CPM running their platform adds alongside on our app. We’ve generated (according to Google Analytics) 1.26 billion pageviews. That means they’ve made about $681k off of our ads.
In fairness, it’s possible the CPM they make is nowhere near what I think it is, and also many pageviews come from our standalone website, so my math is probably an overestimate, but the point is they could easily afford to hire a few people to work full time to do nothing but answer my emails and they’d still be making a bundle off of us! That’s not even counting what we’ve spent in ads. And I’ve needed maybe two emails answered in the entire year, meaning one person could probably handle about 1,000 developers our size (which there aren’t).
So needless to say we were rather frustrated. Then right in the middle of this, Y Combinator announced their partnership with Facebook. I got the email of someone to contact, emailed him, and had the app fixed and back online within a matter of hours.
The moral of the story: Y Combinator just saved our bacon.