by Tien Tzuo

This week, we’re in Palm Springs at the DEMO 2009 event to launch our latest product, Z-Commerce for Facebook and our first developer contest, ‘Subscribe, Don’t Advertise.’ What’s it all about? First, some context:

Today, there are over 660,000 Facebook developers who collectively have built over 52,000 applications, and are adding 140 new applications every day. As impressive as these numbers are – the fact remains that, with a few exceptions, Facebook developers are not making any money.

Today, Facebook developers rely primarily on advertising to generate cash – and we all know that ads just don’t work. Think about it – do you click on ads in Gmail?….I didn’t think so.

But, what if Facebook developers had another choice? What if it was easy for them to sell their applications as monthly fees, quarterly fees, or even, crazy as it sounds, based on how much the application is used. This idea really got us thinking (and you know how we feel about subscriptions).

At Zuora, we imagine a world where every Facebook user pays some developer one dollar, per month, for some application that they found valuable. That’s 2 billion dollars a year that Facebook developers could be making.

That’s the world that is now possible, with our new Z-Commerce for Facebook. We’re so excited about this concept that we’ve also launched our first developer contest named ‘Subscribe, Don’t Advertise.’ We’re looking for five Facebook developers to be the very first to build a subscription-based application with Z-Commerce for Facebook.

All developers are encouraged to apply. Selected developers will receive free access to Z-Commerce for Facebook for one year.

More information about the product and the contest is available here: https://developer.zuora.com/facebook.

You can watch our presentation live at 9.30am on February March 2nd.

And, we’ll be posting videos and pictures from our on-stage presentation at DEMO 2009. Stay tuned!