It was probably too lucrative to ignore – Facebook is now directly in the offers business (yes, all that Scamville stuff) as a way to pay for Facebook Credits, which can then be used to buy virtual goods in games and other apps on Facebook. We reported that this was in the works earlier this week.
They’re starting things off very carefully with offers only from TrialPay and Peanut Labs, who are known for being the cleanest of the clean when it comes to offers (read this guest post by TrialPay CEO Alex Rampell).
More details at InsideFacebook. I don’t expect we’ll see the really scammy stuff like mobile subscriptions and Video Professor pop up on Facebook directly. But I would expect them to broaden the offer providers over time to guys like Offerpal and SuperRewards, who have been much more aggressive about monetization in the past.
Either way though, we suspect that Facebook is taking the lion’s share of revenue from the offer providers, which means that even when they work with the providers there isn’t much revenue in it for them. Over time It may just make more sense for Facebook to go direct, maybe by buying one of the offer providers, and then cut everyone else out.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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