[prostoalex]

>> - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid.

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.

[mratzloff]

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?

[prostoalex]

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.