Facebook Inc has announced that they will be launching their own app store, where Facebook users have the option of purchasing apps on the social network, this is the company’s latest effort to expand the ways it can make money from it’s massive audience of roughly 900 million users.
The app store is said to launch in a few weeks and would value the company anywhere from $77 billion and $96 billion. Facebook makes the vast majority of it’s revenue thanks to online ads, as well as collecting fees from consumer purchases in social apps, such as Zynga’s Farmville. There is however concern with majority of users accessing Facebook from their smartphones, where Facebook provides limited ads. As well, the option for using smart phones to access Facebook has made Facebook’s number of daily users to grow faster than the number of ads it’s delivering.
The new App Centre will allow software developers to sell apps to consumers directly on Facebook, some apps will have the option of being able to run on smartphones such as the iPhone and Androids, if this is the case, when purchasing an app you will get directed to Apple’s App store or Google Inc’s Play Store to download the app.
Apps on the Facebook site will be purchased with Facebook Credits, which is the company’s payment system. Facebook will be receiving a 30 percent cut of the revenue of the purchase of these apps by it’s consumers.
Users will be able to rate the apps they download, and give them quality scores, so other users have an idea of what’s hot and what’s not. As well, Facebook will be monitoring how often and how long people are actually using the apps. Another cool feature is that each user will have their own customized version of the App Centre, versus having one standardized version.
What do you think of Facebook’s App Centre?