Consumers Will Buy 40 Billion Facebook Credits This Year

By  |  April 22, 2012
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A vice president for a small business focused on Facebook commerce estimates consumers will buy 40 billion Facebook credits this year.

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    That estimate was offered by Dean Alms, vice president of marketing and business development for Milyoni. Milyoni has received $14 million in financial backing to date, including an $11 million round completed in February.

    “The growth will be fueled by new digital content available on Facebook, use of Facebook Credits to reward brand loyalty and better marketing of a social currency that is still in its infancy,” Alms writes in a guest post for TechCrunch.

    Credits already account for a significant amount of Facebook’s business. In 2011, Credits generated around 15 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenues, its S-1 filing shows.

    It’s also already a rapidly growing business segment. In the first quarter of 2010, Facebook Credits created about $5 million in business for the social network. Then between the first and fourth quarters of 2011, the segment grew 247 percent — ending up contributing $188 million to the company’s revenues in that final quarter.

    The skyrocketing payments operation is sure to have a substantial impact on the entire payments industry as a whole. “If you’re in the payments business you need to worry,” our own David Evans wrote earlier this year.

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    More from Evans: “The not-so-far-fetched worry for payments companies is that Facebook sucks in a significant portion of online and offline commerce. In fact that’s where I’m putting my money… Most significant businesses have Facebook fan pages. Facebook and these merchants have a strong interest in moving commerce on to Facebook: Facebook because that’s where the money is, and merchants because that’s where their customers are.”

    For more, read Evans’ analyses of Facebook Credits as a currency, and more specifically as a means for payment within the social network.

    The complete column from Alms’ is available online as well. Read that story here.

    Note: David Evans is the owner of getta!Table, a Facebook deal program for restaurant offers. The program utilizes Facebook Credits.


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