Facebucks: Facebook Money Becomes Reality

Yesterday, the online social media giant Facebook entered the gift card business by selling Facebook Credits cards at Target store near you. The credits allow you to buy applications and virtual goods (think World of Warcraft gold farming, but without the farming and at a much larger scale).

Ron Callari of satirizes the advent of Facebook Credits in his online cartoon kid millenium, over at Inventor Spot:

The fictional accounting of Facebook in the graphic novel highlights how the social network has morphed into its own currency producing enterprise – hence the name "Facebucks." "Dumb F*cks" comes from an IM message Mark Zuckerberg (aka "Z-Man" in the graphic novel) foolishly used to describe Facebook’s early followers when the network debuted in his Harvard dorm room. Now scaling past 500+ million users, Facebook could be viewed as an emerging sovereign state, only shy of India’s and China’s populations. [...]

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch revealed today that through unofficial Facebook sources, Facebook will hit $2 billion by year-end. If that be the case, Facebook’s entry into the growing gift card mark could boost those revenue figures exponentially. According to Mercator Advisory Group, the domestic prepaid gift card market is expected to reach $86.2 billion this year, compared with $80.6 billion in 2009. With Facebook Credit gift cards added to the mix, that’s a lot of upside potential for "Facebucks."

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