Was it that hard? "If you make money on our platform, you need to give us a percentage," seems sort of like an obvious monetization strategy. Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Re:The sad story of Facebook Platform
by prostoalex on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @05:41PM
(#6093105)
Most of the apps at the time optimized for pageviews and monetized through DoubleClick, AdSense and other third-party ad networks, so there was non-trivial task of proving that "making money" was happening, followed by further non-trivial task of actually collecting such revenue from all of the jurisdictions.
>> Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.
It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel.
It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.