Digital gifts will bring Facebook 35 million

Translation: Roman Yuriev, toodoo is a social network of website users, especially for Habrahabr

In January of this year, it became known that Facebook started selling virtual goods over the Internet, earning a predicted profit of $ 15 million. This forecast is based on an analysis of products sold daily for 7 weeks.

Facebook employees scored a certain amount of each of the goods, called "gifts." When the number of gifts in a certain group drops below 100,000, the Facebook site displays the remaining amount. (The most usual quantities are 100 thousand and 1 million goods, but there may be 10 million and 15 thousand.) For the same goods, which remained less than 100 thousand, we can track the number of gifts sold in the last week. You must subtract the rest of the current week from the rest of the previous seven days.
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This month, we slightly refined the analysis and found that the pace of marketing for Facebook has increased significantly. Before, we controlled the amount of each type of goods available for sale (of course, if we could get this data). We viewed products based on their popularity among customers (determined by the company itself). And since the data we possessed is rather scarce, we divided the list into 20 groups and took an average of each group — 20 items. Next, we calculated the rate of sales for all products in each group.

As soon as we excluded free goods from the calculations, we obtained such average data.

Average number of gifts sold in a group

Item No.	To number	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Average data
one	20	23122	15236	17303	18533.7
21	40	1572.7	814.3	1272	1219.7
41	60	982.5	630.4	306	639.6
61	80	643.2	384	638.9	488.7
81	100	442.7	307.9	258.6	336.4
101	120	368.9	219	241.1	276.3
121	140	462.9	237.5	407.1	369.2
141	160	236.8	241.6	204.6	227.6
161	180	330.2	206.3	188	241.5
181	200	314.1	226.8	218.6	253.2
201	220	187.7	133.1	172.4	164.4
221	240	227.2	167.3	128.4	174.3
241	260	128.4	98.1	79	101.8
261	280	170.7	91.1	92.2	118
281	300	237.6	85.3	91	138
301	320	99.2	101.9	266.8	156
321	340	100.2	90.1	81,8	90.7
341	360	64.3	49,8	35.9	50
361	380	53.3	60.5	56	56,6

If you multiply each number from the “Average data” column by 20 and add the total sales results to the result, we get an approximate total of sales of virtual gifts in the amount of 390 thousand to 600 thousand pieces per week. This is an average of three weeks is about 470 thousand units of goods.

Most gifts on Facebook are purchased from the first list of products in the directory. Almost 80% of all sales are a group of the first 20 gifts. This proves the self-reinforcing nature of the popularity of products (crowd syndrome rather than the wisdom of the crowd) - provided that the data on the popularity of certain products are made public among users.

Seasonality is also worth taking into account. In most retail stores, somewhere around 40% of all annual sales occur just in the last 8 weeks of the year. Given the large number of thematic holiday gifts offered by Facebook last year, this trend is also characteristic of the social network.

Themed holiday items like Santa's cap or egg whipping with sugar, rum or wine and similar products dominated the list of the most popular, and its sales were 4,755 items per week.

If we apply this assumption to average weekly sales, then the number defining this quantity needs to be multiplied by 73.3 instead of 52 to get a preliminary estimate of annual sales. Based on this estimate, we can conclude: Facebook sold 28.5-43.5 million gifts in a year (an average of about 34.5 million).

Unfortunately, only one product among the first 20 was attached weekly updated information about the number of remaining gifts. That is, even these our calculations risk being very erroneous. For example, “Hugging bears” were on the 6th or 7th place in popularity among birthday gifts. So, by the popularity of this gift falls into the top twenty most frequently purchased goods. If we apply the uncertainty percentage of 25% to each of the goods in the twenty, in the end, their sales will be characterized by approximately the same numbers: 28-42 million pieces.

In both cases, these results are twice as much as we expected at the beginning of the year (approximately 15 million gifts purchased online). This assumption was made on the basis of data obtained during the holidays. That is, the numbers could be overestimated on this basis.

If we also take into account that the creator of Facebook Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg) prophesies to his brainchild profits of 300-350 million this year, then digital gifts can be considered an excellent source of secondary profits of the company.