MattMaroon.com

I’ve mentioned previously that when you’re developing on somebody else’s platform “you have to be ever-mindful of the fact that you’re playing in somebody else’s back yard”. Never has this been more apparent than when Facebook announced their new Verified Apps program going live yesterday. Apparently one of the dangers of working on someone else’s platform is outright blackmail.

Facebook really couldn’t have done a better job with this rollout, if their intention was to piss off developers. Basically here’s the way it happened. Many months ago, they announced their intention to create a Verified Apps program, wherein app developers would submit their applications for verification. We were told we’d receive various benefits, though they were murky. The only thing clear was the cost: $375 per year.

Registrations opened about 6 months ago, at which point many people paid their fee, and until today little more was said. And almost immediately app developers’ allocations (basically the amount of things Facebook lets your app do) started dropping. Apps like ours, which maintained a relatively constant invite acceptance rate, and even lowered the amount of spam reports and the like, went from being able to send out 20 invites per user per day to 16, then to 12, and sometimes even as low as 8.

This is more significant than it may sound. Many apps on Facebook spread primarily through invites, and senders seem to act in an almost binary manner, either sending out 0 on a given day, or sending out whatever the maximum allowable number is. So knocking an app from 20 invites per day down to 12 might not be exactly a 40% reduction, but it’s not very far off. Facebook was slowly but steadily choking off apps.

Games, which are the only apps on Facebook with any lasting value, were among the ones hardest hit. Meanwhile the new home page rewarded other apps that spread mainly through wall posts and feed messaging. Facebook made the already easy-to-ignore app invites even less noticeable, and hammered users with a barrage of “What Golden Girl Are You?” type garbage. Junky quiz apps that before struggled to survive rocketed to the top of the directory, while a lot of the mid-level (but growing) games saw their traffic turn into an upside down V.

With a little creativity, many of us have been able to turn it around, at least a little, but for most game developers the platform’s glory days are over, or so it seemed. But now you can get them back for the low, low price of $375! Facebook’s Verified Apps program seems to do little of any use except bump your allocations back to where they were before it was ever announced.

On one hand, I’m not as angry about it as I might sound. It’s their platform, why should they not do what they can to monetize it? $375 per year is a joke for a successful app. It’s a small fraction of what even a mid-level app makes in a day there. It’s clear that their ad platform is never going to amount to anything, so even though our apps give them a few million extra impressions per day, that’s not going to pay the bills.

On the other hand, it’s just shady how it was rolled out. It feels too much like extortion. Sell me on the benefits of Verified Apps by making it a good program. I feel like someone smashed me on the head with a baseball bat and then said “hey, I’m a doctor, you better pay me to check and see if you have a concussion.”

But, once again, it’s their house and it’s their rules, so there’s little I can do but pay my $375 and just be thankful. It could be worse, they could be Apple.

This entry was posted on May 21, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.