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MySpace To App Developers: Pay Us or Get No Users
Let the "featured application" wars begin! Today we've learned that MySpace is now charging to be listed in their "featured apps" section on the MySpace Apps Gallery. The Apps Gallery launched to all MySpace users a week ago.
How much is a placement? Nick O'Neill says it's $100,000 per WEEK. And guess who has all four slots -- the company supposedly worth half a billion dollars, Slide. So basically the app gallery will now feature those with deep pockets and MySpace tells all other application developers to f-off. How many app developers can afford that kind of money? Few. Of course if MySpace can show that a week in a sponsored slot leads to enough users installing an application to justify the cost, other developers might scrape every penny to get in.
To play devil's advocate, SimplyHired also allows you to pay for your job listings to show up first on results pages. Google let's you buy keywords for terms you are interested in. If you see the apps gallery as a search result page, why shouldn't MySpace be allowed to sell the space to the highest bidder?
Peter Kafka goes with the "I am a stockholder" view which is to suck them dry. Adam Ostrow makes the point clear:
Applications like Top Friends and Super Poke have huge brand recognition, and the fact that those apps can now be front and center is going to make it nearly impossible for an upstart with little cash to gain big-time popularity. It also means that the big developers can piggy back on the little guys for innovation – copying promising ideas and then writing a check to MySpace to steal all of the exposure.
Here's the difference between the MySpace platform and the Facebook platform. Facebook needs the developers and their apps for growth. MySpace doesn't and that's why they can charge and get away with it. If Facebook were smart they would play this up bigtime as to why they are the better choice for developers.
Here's the hard sell slide, the other slides can be found on Nick's site.
I have tried to make a mathematical ROI analysis to this 50-100k investment and have calculated it will take about 1.5 years to pay itself off. Please have a look here: 'MySpace Featured Apps. Mathematical Analysis - Is it worth $75k?' and let me know what you think!
myspace Developer Platform sucks out loud. I tried to implement my application and I could not get it to work because they rewrite your code when it gets published to the server.
your hands are so tied that it's a huge waste of time to build anything there unless you start from the ground up. but even then, you have no real way of testing until they move the code to prod (which takes several hours because it appears to be a scheduled process.
then when you submit your app for approval, it takes several days for someone to reject it.
it's unbelievably frustrating! I am a developer by profession. I can usually find a solution for any challenge I am presented with, but I give up on myspace. it's too backassward for me!
ok so even though i was completely annoyed with the MDP, i finally got my app running and dude no matter how frustrating it is to get the thing implemented (im still not 100% there yet), wow! they have the audience!!
maybe my app just appeals more to the myspace crowd, but the installs compared to facebook are exponentially more!!!
do yourself a favor, be persistent through the approval process...be prepared for many hours of pulling your hair out, but stick with it....
the effort is well worth it...