Founder and Lead Developer
Here’s how the AdSense experiement on Facebook went:
AdSense eCPM: $0.35 (ranging from $0.02 to $1.60)
Cubics CPM (Average): $0.70 (minimum $0.67 to maximum $0.74)
Take Cubics, play safe, or take AdSense and try to maximize clicks in whatever way you can.
If this bit of information is anything to go by, the social networking bubble is either bordering on the edge of being ridiculous, or Yahoo might be on to something.
Yahoo are looking a little stagnant, and a switch to social media might create the largest social network overnight. On the other hand, if implemented poorly, Yahoo will keep going down the drain. With 500 million active users compared to MySpace’s 110m and Facebook’s 60m, Yahoo will automatically get the largest userbase in no time at all.
This represents the first time a major force is switching to the social format rather than experimenting with smaller projects like Orkut or the now dysfunctional MyWallop. Open application development is also on offer, so this might as well become much bigger than Facebook or MySpace, if they do it right!
This was in an update sent to certain users by Facebook.
A lot of people have cried out over Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. However, there are certain points that support such a ridiculously high value. Investor Paul Buchheit has written an interesting article about how Facebook has the benefit of knowing about your entire real-life social network, clouded only by a few random online friends here and there, and how they could leverage it.
This comes from padrenel’s blog. It discusses important things to know while getting started with Facebook application development. Must read in my opinion, helped me immensely. It discusses:
Trust me, it doesn’t feel good, but it proves a point, I made a fair game! Yes, the Indian Premier League has begun and so has my application for Facebook. Here’s how I’m doing in the fantasy game:
Not looking too good, I’m afraid!
There are many advantages to using the shell, one is making backups. With the following code and a cron job, periodically backing up MySQL databases is a breeze.
#!/bin/sh mkdir `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M` cd `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M` mysqldump -h localhost -u user -ppassword dbname > file.sql
Monetizing Facebook applications is a difficult job. First, there’s no dominant ad network for Facebook. I’ve started experimenting with AdSense on some pages of my Indian Premier League application. Here are some things I’ve learn so far:
South Korea and Japan are world leaders in terms of broadband penetration, costs and bandwidth. What surprises me is why most of the world’s hosts are based out of the United States.
Now, the cost of an internet connection is not just bandwidth costs, it includes hardware, technical expertise, etc. but even considering that, it might still be worth it to invest in Korea/Japan.
I understand costs for consumers and corporations will be different, but country-to-country, they run parallel.
This is virtually a U.S. monopoly. Compare this with the following chart showing average download speeds across the world.
Seems to me like one part of the internet is still stuck in the non-global 1990s. Look out for fireworks in this industry if some people are willing to make bold investments.
This comes from an interesting post by Jesse Farmer. There is no clear winner amongst ad networks for social applications on Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only real way to know is to find out for yourself.
Using PHP, you can randomly show ad codes from multiple ad networks with equal probability. Check the cash and find out which works best for you!
function get_random_ad_code() {
$ad_codes = array(
'lookery' => 'Your Lookery ad code',
'adblade' => 'Your AdBlade ad code',
'socialmedia' => 'Your SocialMedia ad code',
'rockyou' => 'Your RockYou ad code'
);
return $ad_codes[array_rand($ad_codes)];
}
echo get_random_ad_code();
If you want to take it to the next level, you can write more complex algorithms to weigh the ads in favor of the network that works best for you, but that’s outside the scope of this article (for now.)