Facebook announced today an expansion to their Facebook Credits program, including a disclosure of the revenue share they’ll be taking. According to Deborah Liu’s post on the Facebook Developer blog, Facebook Credits supports purchase via fifteen currencies, several credit cards, mobile payments, and recently PayPal, and that they’ll be rolling out the program to more developers over time.
Several large developers have already been accepted into the Facebook Credits program over the past few months, and a small percentage of Facebook users will be able to purchase credits through PayPal and use them, over the next few weeks. Purchased credits can be used in any Facebook application that accepts them.
Facebook’s goal is to provide a single cross-application currency, both to simplify user transactions and thus to increase conversion rates for developers. Developers benefit because the number of potential customers increases. However, developers will be giving up 30% of revenues collected to Facebook — monies Facebook intends to reinvest into improving the Facebook Credits ecosystem.
If you are a developer and want to integrate Facebook Credits into your applications, first check out their FAQ and developer terms, then fill out their survey. The program is in closed beta and they’ll be scaling the system to support wider use.
What do you think? Is this too high a rate for Facebook to be charging, especially when you factor in that PayPal has in the past few months raised its fees? Are you a developer? Do you plan to integrate Facebook Credits into your Facebook applications.
This is kind of a big deal. Not only for the platform applications, but also for connect-enabled sites. If these sites are accepted into the program, facebook users will be able to pay micropayments for them. For example i could have access to premium articles in this very blog by connecting with facebook. This will turn facebook to the defacto micropayments site on the web.