With Facebook constantly searching for new monetization opportunities on the site, could the site’s deals go to far?
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Facebook’s original moneymaking strategist, Tim Kendall, is leaving, ending an almost four-and-a-half year term at the company, TechCrunch reported.

The Director of Monetization had recently announced his plans to leave the company but tomorrow is his last day (Was working on Sundays one of his reasons for leaving?). No one appears to know what Kendall’s next move may be.

In recent years Facebook has hired other money people over Kendall (ouch!) or at his level, said TechCrunch’s founding editor Michael Arrington.

Arrington got a hold of an email sent internally by Facebook’s Vice President of Advertising and Global Operations, David Fischer, who previously ran Google’s global ad department.  Here’s a copy of that missive:

Team,

As some of you may know, Tim Kendall recently announced, in his characteristically modest way, he is leaving Facebook. Tomorrow is officially Tim’s last day.

Over more than four years at Facebook, Tim has had an incredible impact on the company, and in particular on the development of the ads business. Starting back in 2006, Tim wrote the blueprint for our monetization strategy. (You might be wondering how I know this given I haven’t been here that long, but trust me on this — Tim gave me a copy of the document when I started and strongly “advised” me to read it. It was good advice.). In all seriousness, it is safe to say we would not be where we are today without Tim.

Tim recognized early on not only that advertising could be social, but that it should be social on Facebook. What began as “sponsored stories,” social advertising has transformed the marketing business. And again, Facebook has Tim to thank.

Tim is truly a renaissance man. All of us who have worked with him have seen his strong intellect, quiet intensity, and complete focus on the mission at hand, with little tolerance for distractions or bureaucracy. He balances that with a more lively side that seems to come out after dark and has been displayed over the years at fine Palo Alto establishments like Rudy’s and the Old Pro. We will greatly miss all sides of Tim.

It’s a bittersweet honor to be the messenger of news like this. It’s never fun to say goodbye to a beloved and valuable player like Tim, but I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Tim, and to continue to advance the work that Tim started and led for us for such a big part of our company’s history.

So please join me in thanking Tim Kendall for everything he has done for Facebook as a company, and for many of us personally. We will all be watching closely to see what Tim does next and what innovations he brings to light after a well deserved break. All the best to Tim in his next adventure.

Cheers,
David

Readers, what would you guess that Tim Kendall has planned next?

This evening LifeStreet Media has announced the acquisition of Social Cash’s ad network business, one of the leading monetization providers for application developers. In an effort build up the company’s position as “the largest social media ad network”, the company has decided to acquire all the assets of SocialCash. Given that it’s an asset acquisition, Social Cash will continue to operate as an independent company as they ramp up for a new product offering later this year.
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Earlier today Facebook announced a partnership with PayPal who will now become a payments provider for Facebook Credits. While it’s easy to see how these services can work together, many tech pundits have continuously speculated about Facebook’s decision to create a massive payments system. Dave Morin, an ex-Facebook employee, even confirmed in 2008 that the company was working on a payments system but didn’t go into specifics. So what does the future hold for Facebook payments?
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What’s the secret monetization strategy that all the large web startups? That’s the question I was looking to answer when I first started writing about the Facebook platform when it opened up over two years ago and after listening to one web luminary after the other I realized there really is no secret sauce to making money on the social web: you’re either selling ads or selling a product. Why was it that all the executives were speaking as though there was a secret monetization strategy that was just around the corner?

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Boku is a new service that helps application developers monetize their virtual currencies and is officially launching today. The company was started through the acquisition of Mobilcash and Paymo, two of the leading payment providers for mobile consumers. With less than 20 percent of Facebook users having access to a credit card, mobile payment solutions have become a critical component of application monetization.
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According to the Telegraph, Facebook announced at Davos that it will be rolling out a new service to provide real-time research for companies looking to test “the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members” based on their profile information. The new service is a substitute for expensive and time-consuming focus groups that many product oriented companies invest in.
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Following up on my article from yesterday afternoon where I suggested that Facebook should begin focusing on monetization, I figured it would be a good time to suggest at least 20 ways that Facebook could make billions. While I’m critical of the company’s existing monetization strategy, the company is clearly growth oriented and they are in the enviable position of figuring out a way to make billions of dollars. Below are a few ways that we’ve come up with for Facebook to make money.
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The common theory in internet startups is that companies should focus on growth first and then focus on monetization. Facebook stuck to this strategy for all of 2008 and could possibly use the same strategy in 2009, but is that the right thing to do? Many outsiders have been extremely critical of the company that has yet to generate substantial profit worthy of all the hype and perhaps the criticism is well deserved.

Last night I was reading Warren Buffett’s biography, “The Snowball” which starts off describing the scene at Allen & Company’s annual retreat in Sun Valley in 1999 during the peak of the bubble. At that event Warren Buffet gave the last keynote during which he made an interesting statement that was intended to strike out against those participating in the internet hype:
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There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.

Facebook Apps As a Business

While it still doesn’t qualify the company as a large business, it does emphasize the potential for applications in this space. As an individual developer or a small team of developers, $1 million a month is pretty damn good and I’m sure a large portion of that is going straight to the bank. Who’s responsible for generating this revenue?

Well there is already multiple ad networks that are generating revenue for their developers, but some of them are going so far as to speak out about how much money is being generated. Offerpal (who is also a sponsor of and participant in our Social Ad Summit) has said that developers are generating around $75 per 1,000 active daily users on average and $150-$200 for more engaging applications.

How to Generate the Big Bucks

So are you looking to become the next Facebook application millionaire? Good luck! Generating $1 million a month is pretty challenging in the current environment but if you can come up with a creative application, you may have a chance. (fluff)Friends users for instance, are so passionate about the application, that some of them went so far as to participate in a (fluff)Friends video contest. Below are a couple of the top videos.

This application and a few others like Friends For Sale, Mob Wars and Owned, are all highly engaging applications. Each of them continues to attract users months after they were launched and the applications also continue to evolve. If you are looking to build up your revenue base, then you might want to mimic many of the strategies employed by these companies.

Have you hears of any other interesting rumors about application revenue being generated?