These days, everyone has an idea for a killer app. And quite honestly, most of them would probably be pretty cool. But that doesn't mean that they'd make any money! From a business perspective, there is only one technique that should be employed when brainstorming for new application ideas. We call this monetization-minded design.
"Monetization-Minded Design" is a method we have established to create social network applications (or any advertisment-driven website for that matter) around a central earnings model, from stage one. While this technique may limit the sort of applications you can create once you have confined yourself to a particular method of earning, we have found that the financial returns on applications created in this manner have been more than compensatory.
If you're a little confused, it's understandable. Let me simplify it a bit more. What we do, is decide how our application will be earning for us before we decide what kind of application it will be. Sounds like a pretty contradictory statement, huh? Well it isn't. Here's a real life example, it's how we came up with the idea for the Neverending Quiz script that is for sale in our Turnkey Applications section:
Before we had any idea what kind of application we were going to create, we knew that we were going to be basing it around a CPM earnings model. Obviously, since we were being paid per thousand impressions, maximizing impressions to maximize earnings was one of of top priorities. We set a goal of eventually achieving 4,000,000 million pageviews per month from one application, or about $1700-$3000 per month. That's a decent amount of pageviews per month. It's not outrageous, but it's a lot. The key mistake most people make when looking at a figure like this is thinking in terms of single-digit-pageview visits. With the monetization-minded design approach, you think in terms of how you can get 4,000,000 page views from 2000 unique visitors, versus needing to get 4,000,000 page views from 4,000,000 unique visitors. Keep in mind that the seemingly ridiculous amount of traffic needed to generate 4,000,000 pageviews is not a problem! The beauty of social network applications is that the traffic is already there! We'll cover more on that later.
So anyways, we sat down and brainstormed for a bit, knowing that whatever application came out of the session would have an enormous amount of pages, and would require users to be clicking between pages fairly rapidly in order to make any money off the user's seemingly sort attention spans. We figured that we could get a maximum of about 50 or so pageviews from each user before they bounced, regardless of the type of application we created. With our goal of 4,000,000 pageviews per month, that meant we'd need to get 80,000 people to view 50 pages each within our app. You may be thinking to yourself that these numbers seem pretty preposterous! Well keep reading! By the way, getting 80,000+ users per month is not a problem on any social network, it just takes a lot of time and/or money, like anything else.
This is where we had to put our brains to use, and where you'll have to use yours. Come up with an idea for an application that fits your earning model, while still retaining enough entertainment value and originality that users will be drawn to using it each day.
As you know from reading above, the application that came out of this particular brainstorming session was the Neverending Quiz! script. In case you haven't check out the Neverending Disney Quiz or another one of the Neverending Quiz applications on Facebook, here's how it works:
The Neverending Quiz consists of an canvas page section, a profile section, and an admin panel. The frontend is a virtual neverending quiz for the user to take. The only limit to the length is the number of questions that are submitted by users. BY USERS?!? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. Being the lazy developers that we are, we decided that all of the content in each Neverending Quiz should be completely completely user-generated! We added about 30 questions or so ourselves at launch, so the app didn't seem completely empty, and then watched as users began to add more and more questions each day!
We were also wondering how many questions the average user would sit and answer before bouncing. After launching the app, we were shocked, to say the least. We found that users were answering an average of around 121 questions before bouncing! Obviously, this is great! As exstatic as we were at our findings, we soon put our thinking caps back on.
So with our goal of 4,000,000 pageviews per month in mind, we calculated that 4,000,000 / 121 = around 34,000 average users. This number is completely attainable in one month (more on this soon) on any social network. What's more, if we could achieve 34,000 Daily Active Users, we would be making roughly our target amount each day!
So let's consider the facts: We decided we were going to make an application that utilized CPM advertising. We created the Neverending Quiz based on our earnings goal. We decided we were even too lazy to add questions and decided to let users do it. We decided we were even too lazy to approve new questions so we assigned a random user as an officer with the duty of approving new questions each day. We went and played Disc Golf. When we came back we found that we had earned money while we played Disc Golf. And it's been that way ever since. :)
|
Free Movies
Harry Potter
Family Guy-
Disney DVDs
Video Games 
End Dog Abuse
