6 June 2009 No Comment

Facebook launched what looks to be a new payment system. I was reading Inside Facebook when I notice the post titled “Facebook Turns On Another Revenue Stream - Now You Can Pay With Facebook”.

I think that’s an innovative idea. It’s would be a new source of revenue for Facebook. It’s seems look like PayPal button. Facebook have more then 200 million active users worldwide, and this will make it easy for many people to make payments through Facebook.

How much revenue might Facebook’s payment service generate? we estimated the following:

Let’s take a look at the current state of the transaction economy on the Facebook Platform. I’m not going to speculate on numbers here, but for the sake of argument, let’s consider the three widely varying cases that 2008 Platform transactions totaled a) $50 million, b) $150 million, and c) $250 million. Without going into too much detail, let’s quickly approximate that Facebook could net 5% of sales through an integrated payments solution.

At the end of the day, those fees might have added around a) $2.5 million, b) $7.5 million, or c) $12.5 million to Facebook’s top line, not accounting for the lift in transactions that would likely have arisen from a more frictionless payment option. Based on popular estimates of between $250-$300 million in Facebook’s 2008 revenues, a platform payment system could have reasonably boosted total revenues by 3-5+% this year.

I wonder it will spawn a new niche of Facebook credit sellers perhaps? We shall see eh.