This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the Entrepreneur 27 Singapore and Singapore PHP users group.

The panelists included:

• Bernard Leong (Thymos Capital partner, and session moderator)
• Leonard Lin (TYLER Projects managing partner – developer of Facebook application BattleStations!)
• Kien Lee (Senatus founder – an investment holding company which owns more than 100 Facebook applications)
• and myself (through my work on the $uperRewards monetization system for Facebook applications)

Facebook Application Monetization Panel: Leonard Lin, myself, Bernard Leong, Kien Lee

I had my MP3 recorder capture most of our panel discussion and you can access the recording below.

Friday Podcast: Facebook Developers Garage [ 44:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1326)

For more coverage, check out:

• ThinkingNectar’s live blogging post of the panel discussion
• Nicole’s live blogging post of the panel discussion

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In a couple of hours time I’ll be on the panel at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage, which features the topic: “Marketing and Monetization of FB Applications: Hype or Goldmine?”

The session moderator Bernard Leong has posted a kickoff post: Marketing and Monetization of Facebook: Prologue

If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.

Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.

These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…

A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.

Let’s break this down for a moment…

An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.

$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…

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Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.

I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)

With an average of (more…)

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I’ll be on a panel next week at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage on March 5th, 715pm-1030pm.

The event is sponsored by Microsoft and the National University of Singapore.

Here’s a snippet of the panel:

If you didn’t already know, a number of the hottest Facebook Applications are coming out of (more…)

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