The Wallstreet Journal Europe published an interesting insight into the economics of Facebook applications. Under the headline ‘Some Facebook Applications Thrive, Others Flop’ the author Riva Richmond tries to answer the fundamental question ‘What has worked and what hasn’t?’. Among the interesting finds are:

• 250.000 people requested an API key
• 24.000 (!) applications were build - that’s 65 apps a day (!!) - which is a lot of competition if you intend to build a Facebook app

The harsh economic reality is:

• 1% of apps account for 2/3 of activity (traffic)
• Only the top 200 apps have more than 10.000 users per day
• 60% of apps have less than 100 users per day

These numbers don’t surprise me too much - the Facebook numbers reflect an economic reality which API programs like the one from eBay faced for a long time: Only very few apps actually gain enough traction to make money.

The Facebook platform is not a magic platform and you can plug in anything and it will be successful. It doesn’t make something that’s not useful useful.

Ben Ling, director of platform marketing at Facebook.

Read the full article here.