Netodex

We’ve just concluded an interesting facebook application experiment. We took two simple apps that were both built on the same basic code. They picked a random phrase and output it along with a random number.

We made one application a “fortune cookie app” which gave the user a lucky number and an amusing and often nonsense phrase like you would find in a real fortune cookie.

The other was a much more morbid ‘how and when will I die?’ application which used the random number to tell the user how many years they had left to live and the random phrase became the predicted method of death.

We got two facebook users (members of our team) to spend 15 minutes a day promoting by joining groups and publishing feeds to their wall, etc. Both members had roughly the same number of friends on their lists, etc. To keep it even more fair they would swap apps each day so if one was slightly better at promoting that than the other it should all even out.

The results on the growth of the two apps was astonishing…

How and when will I die app after two weeks.

Fortune cookie app after two weeks.

That is a ten fold difference.  It just goes to show how important it is to find the right app for facebook. Both these do the same sort of thing but the more morbid ‘death’ theme quite clearly is far more viral than the fortune cookie idea.

And the initial revenue for the how and when will I die app isn’t too bad either. Here are the stats from the ads for that app for the two week test period.

Revenue from one app over 2 weeks from launch.

Bear in mind that data is from launch over a 2 week period with one person doing a 15 minutes promotion a day using free methods.  The very next day the same app pulled another $6.82 from Rockyou ads!

The day after the trial finished...

Our How and When will I die application was initially a script we bought in, but we have now done a toal re-write from the ground up and incorporated the new feed system but without it having to ask the user for extended rights.  We will be making this script available for sale in the next few days.