Message summary [id.364074027012189]

I've been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend. One thing I've been thinking about a lot this is that we really should start a payments product for real-world goods and offer it at a much lower rate outside of canvas. Mobile apps need something like this for real-world purchases as well since iOS only does virtual goods. If we layer in a service like this with our login, then that's a pretty awesome combo and a good reason for people to use FB platform. I also think that if we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea is that any other revenue you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you owe us for using platform. For most developers, this would probably cover the cost completely. So instead of actually ever paying us directly, they'd just use our payments or ads products. A basic model could be: - Login with Facebook is always free - Pushing content to Facebook is always free - Reading anything, including friends, costs a lot of money. Perhaps on the order of ~$0.10 / user each year. For the money that you owe, you can cover it in any of the following ways: - Buy ads from us in neko or another system - Run our ads in your app or website (canvas apps already do this) - Use our payments - Sell your items in our Karma store Or if the revenue we get from those doesn't add up to more than the fees you owe us, then you just pay us the fee directly. The rate of $0.10 / user each year might even be too low. For example, at that rate Spotify would have to spend just $3m per year with us in ads to be even and Pinterest would be around there too. We might be able to get this number to be meaningfully higher, especially if we don't charge until a dev has a meaningful number of users, like 50k or 100k. I've been reading a lot of books on finance and banking recently, and even though the idea of an information bank is not identical to financial bank, the comparison suggests some interesting things. For example, banks charge you interest for as long as you have their money out. Rather than letting devs pay a one time fee to fetch data, we could effectively do this by mandating that devs must keep data fresh and update their data each month for anything they call. Another idea is charging different developers different rates for things. The whole banking industry is based on charging people different rates. It may be that instead of having a flat fee for everyone, we should instead try set a norm were there's some range but the expectation is each developer gets some rate specific to them once they're at scale. Anyhow, those are just a few thoughts. We should haven't finalized our plan here yet so we should keep discussing this. In the meantime, I'd love to spin up an effort to build a real-world payments product for devs outside of canvas.