How to make money from your Facebook profile

By Davey Winder
Monday, 01 June 2009 17:05

Home IT

Think that social networking is a waste of time? Try telling that to the online entrepreneur who has sold his profile to a tongue cleaning company.

Who said that social networking was a waste of time? Certainly not the entrepreneur who started the 'kisses' Facebook profile. He has seen the kisses fan base rise to more than a million, a real rarity on Facebook, during the last year.

It turns out he is not the only one to spot the brand friendly, marketing opportunistic, generic profile. A tongue cleaning company has won a bidding war for the rights to the kisses public profile.

Nobody is saying exactly how much money has changed hands here, but you can bet it was far from insignificant and here is why. Every time the profile owner posts a message to his page it also pops up on the status page of some 1,158,000 other Facebook users who are listed as fans.

Wowser, now that's what I call a decent advertising channel. Especially as the profile is growing fans at the rate of 1000 new ones a day I am told. The trick here is that because this is a Facebook page, rather than a group per se, it has what is known as stream access and so the status page updates enter into the value proposition.

The entrepreneur in question would appear to be Dominic Mars Holland who claims that he has been approached by many companies regarding different pages in what he calls his Facebook inventory. "Of Facebooks few number of pages over 1M fans" he says, adding "I personally control a significant number and if not my pages, were created by associates of myself."

Good luck to him, at least as far as generic names are concerned. Just as with web domains before, those who snap up generic names early on stand to make a killing later in the day. Sex.com springs to mind, despite the protracted legal problems it has faced, as far as big money is concerned.

But just as with the web in general, domain squatting and trademark issues will inevitably crop up. Twitter already has a problem with celebrity fakes fooling people into thinking they are the real whoever, and Facebook is going to have to get a grip on trademarks if it wants to avoid almost certain legal problems down the road.

The real question that I have to ask, though, is just how long will it take the commercialisation of social networking in terms of advertising through profiles to ruin the fun? Sadly, I suspect the answer is not very long at all.