My new facebook app (http://www.cha.fm) tells users about their social friends, its like a mini 'Statcounter', or 'Google Analytic' alike tool the Facebook social network. When I first started, its growth was very slow, but somehow it reached some power users, mentioned in some magazines, and have grown to over 190K users in half year. I believe many users found it useful (got 9000+ likes). However the only way I can use the traffic is by selling some banner space and text links, and the ad dollor from it is very small. The banner network is paying by CPM and usually the CPM is less than $1, and my hosting cost is growing fast because of the high usage of the app. This is a new ground for me as I was mainly focus on developing traditional website projects. Would appreciate any suggestion about how to better use the traffic, where to look for partners, and how to increase the app's usefulness.
Wow. That's amazing. Is there a way to drive traffic from the app (the people who are using the app) and to your website (or any other website for that matter)? If it is, without destroying the app, you can use this traffic to build a list, or monetize it in a different way.
The app directly works from your blog. That means everytime some one uses the app your blog visits get increased. If your blog gets down for a while, the app also won't work.
Congratulations on the success of your app - although I'm not really into using stuff like that, it looks pretty cool and I can see how it is popular. Is the app losing you at the moment? Or are the revenues bigger than the costs but you just want to increase them?