Money Comes From the Weirdest Places

Seriously.. I remember seeing presentations on the mobile phone business and how ringtones are so ridiculously huge.  Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on these miniscule clips of existing songs (that the buyer has probably already paid for in another format). But that’s not news.

What’s news to me is how much money Facebook is making off of gifts.  Gifts are basically little pictures you can send to someone with a message.  It’s just a row in a database table somewhere, but of course the sentiment behind it can be worth more than that.  Point is, they don’t cost Facebook anything to send.

And yet apparently people are buying them like mad.  Check this out:


These are all gifts that are “Sold Out”, so each of these represents an amount of money Facebook has made off of just selling gifts.