Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at conference, stated that Facebook Credits were "not a revenue opportunity anytime soon" for the social network. "Ads are a very good business," said Zuckerberg, in a statement reported by Venture Beat. Instead, Zuckerberg says that Facebook Credits are being rolled out to try and help developers more easily monetize their games, through sale of virtual goods or microtransaction services.
Speaking at the same event, Facebook Credits manager Deb Liu said that there are now more than 10,000 games on the Facebook platform. Over 200 million Facebook users play at least one game once per month, but most users play roughly four different Facebook games. According to Liu, that means over 800 million game sessions happen on Facebook in a given month. The intended role of Facebook Credits, according to Liu, is to help developers by giving them acces to a frictionless payment method.
Right now Facebook plans to launch Credits officially in June, after spending roughly a year beta testing the new virtual currency. Facebook plans to use Credits as part of loyalty and rewards packages, such as a Chase credit card that rewards users with Facebook Credits. Facebook is currently signing partners to the program, which it will call App2User Credits. Facebook will also be giving users small amounts of free credits at the June launch to get people comfortable with the idea of virtual currency.
Perhaps the most ambitious goal of Facebook Credits is to try and dramatically increase conversion rates by reducing friction in the payment process. Most social games on Facebook typically get between 1% and 3% of users to spend money on virtual items. Facebook Credits hopes to boost that figure to 8% to 20%, purely by simplifying the payment process. Facebook also plans to implement special features like an auto-fill option for the Credits e-wallet, which will automatically purchase more Credits when a user runs low.
Although Zuckerberg makes much of how Facebook expects no profit from Facebook Credits anytime soon, this sentiment seems at odds with the 30% cut of transactions that Facebook is taking. Most other payment services working with social games now take only a 5% to 10% cut of transactions. It's possible that Facebook needs to take a bigger cut to justify the overhead costs involved in developing the Facebook Credits system, but then it's not clear why Facebook wouldn't want to aggressively monetize its investment.
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