I've seen many free applications and games on Facebook, but I was wondering, how do the creators make money from them? Some of them do have points that you can purchase to unlock more features and levels, but what about those that don't have this? If I made a game or application for Facebook, how would I be able to make money from it if it's offered for free?
Ad revenue and special offers you sign up for in order to get favor points. If you want to do it let me know
By ad revenue, you mean they embed other companies' ads into their apps or games and get paid for it or you mean Facebook provides them with ads and they get a percentage from the earnings?
you are correct, its very similar to adsense, you can use companies like cubic ads and they pay you for displaying the ads on your app, or like dues ex says there are reward companies, like superrewards and offerpal that lets you display iframe code with offers that users can complete for in-game currency and then they pay you based on what offers your app users complete
And can you tell me which is the profit of Playfish? They have a lot of games at facebook, but I dont see any add on it.
A good way: you can create an app on Facebook, get it to 10K to 100K users, harvest some ad revenue from it. To do so, you can have some partnering with AdBrite for CPM/CPC ads, offer Cost Per Install ads via Adonomics and you provide data to get an Adonomics certified valuation, then you will be ready to get some bucks for your apps.
It can help you get personal branding and name recognition. Apart from that you can sell the game if the buyer is willing to shell out dollars for it. Other than that, there is no monetary return on the time and effort you spend on building facebook app like game etc. unless that app is intended to drive traffic to your website.