Is Facebook a Kids Game?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 2nd, 2008 12:00 PMKara Swisher has a post up arguing that Facebook is still for kids. She uses a graph which charts the number of applications for each category. On that chart, the “Just for Fun” category dominates all other categories. This has been one of the biggest challenges for brands entering the Facebook platform. Want to brand your high-end service or product to consumers? Facebook may not be the place for that.
This is why a number of companies are turning toward LinkedIn and figuring out when their platform will launch on a larger scale. They may not end up being a comparable platform to Facebook as individual companies may be forced to approach LinkedIn directly. This is one way that the company can generate the high CPMs that were being buzzed about in the blogosphere earlier this week.
Facebook still has its place though. If you think about various marketing campaigns and who they are targeting, which platform would you be most likely to launch an application on if you are going to advertise the application on the back of a cereal box? I’d probably say MySpace. What about if you are going to advertise the application around your college campus and on your college’s website? Facebook.
Kara may just be right that Facebook is for entertaining and more engaging applications which are less focused on utility. While there are plenty of utility based applications, most of them have not seen success. What about that golden application that I’ve talked about over the past year? Maybe the golden application doesn’t exist and in reality, the golden applications on Facebook are really just highly engaging and fun.
Do you think utility applications will be successful on Facebook?
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Maybe it was too aspirational to term Facebook a utility or maybe it just hasn't achieved that yet. Maybe the majority of its users want fun & don't want a utility.
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As alicia pointed out, you also need to look at active users. How many applications in the "Just for Fun" category are failed and/or abandoned applications?
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Is the home PC for kids because of the tens of thousands of games that have been released for decades? It seems like her argument would eventually lead her to announce the internet is just for lechers and teens too...
And I know many people that use Facebook frequently and deeply but hardly ever interact with applications.
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