Zynga CEO Mark Pincus made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to
If a startup makes an app or service that appeals to Facebook users, Facebook can help the developer who built the app or service rebuild it so that it connects to Facebook in such a way that it's very findable for Facebook's billion users.
The reason Facebook does this is that by improving the apps that connect to Facebook, Facebook itself improves.
Zynga may be on its way down now, but for years, it benefitted from this connection – long enough for CEO Mark Pincus to increase his personal wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars.
That was because Zynga made games that appealed to Facebook users, and Facebook decided to partner with Zynga to promote them.
Sometimes Facebook is more direct granting riches.
In late 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger made a mobile-only photo-sharing app that Facebook users immediately loved.
In 2012, Facebook bought this app, Instagram, for a billion dollars.
(After the deal, Facebook integrated Instagram even more prominently into Facebook.com and Facebook apps. Now there's evidence that Instagram has more users than Twitter.)
There's more riches where Zynga's and Instagram's came from.
Want in?
During the SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Facebook executive Sam Lessin hinted at how to.
He spoke at an event and told developers that Facebook really wants them to build "Lifestyle" apps for its platform.
All Things D's Mike Issac reports:
“We can’t succeed — and we’re really not an interesting product — without a strong developer community around us,” said Sam Lessin, Facebook’s director of Identity Products, at a South by Southwest event on Sunday.
Games were Facebook’s clear breakout hit (hence, the rise of Zynga). Then came the onslaught of music, news and video apps. Now, Facebook is heavily promoting a new class of apps — so-called “lifestyle” apps.
The company is working closely with developers creating apps for actions like reading books, sharing which movies you just watched, and blasting out what your recent fitness stats are to your friends.
Basically, it’s Facebook’s way of fostering more sharing inside its network. Otis Chandler, CEO of the well-adopted social reading app Goodreads, told me that apps in the lifestyle category — like reading, for instance — are more likely to be shared among users, hence Facebook’s increase in promoting apps like Goodreads (among others).
For that promotion, Goodreads gets a much-desired bump in traffic. Since the company launched its Facebook app in January of 2012, Chandler’s company has grown from 6.5 million users to upward of 15 million. (Though not all of that growth is a direct result of the Facebook app, mind you.) That’s a nice signal for other developers in the space looking to build successfully on top of Facebook.