Did Facebook just miss a huge ($3 Million+) revenue opportunity?

Not sure how much ill-will it would have caused. Also what is $3M anyways to a company making most it's revenue off of ad revenue?

And could only imagine the amount of revenue taken off the top from $.99 transactions.

Thanks for the comments, and I am a big fan of Viddler. I used the service on www.Lotame.com

While I was at lunch today, I had an epiphany. Facebook should have charged for the URLs for several reasons:

Revenue: even if it doesn't feel like a lot of revenue you have to start somewhere (and they now have 6,000,000 URLs registered as reported by Silicon Alley Insider) They did just take $200 Million in Venture Capital...I am not certain about the transactional cost, but Apple has figured it out with the $.99 app.

Premium Service: Facebook has stated (and restated) that they want to find premium services to charge for...this could have been a first try. And like so many things in life, once you give something away for free, it is very hard to charge for that item or service in the future.

Testing: They could have proved out their new Micro-Payment platform, and set the stage for 1st and 3rd party payments in a secure way.

When I started this debate, I was fairly neutral, but now I am leaning toward the position that they should have tested applying a small annual fee for this service.

Given that they haven't raised the floor yet on the ability to buy highly targeted social ads, I think Facebook is missing a multi-Bn dollar opportunity by not charging users $0.99/month for use (and yes, I would paid $0.99 for the vanity URL...Apple "app" like = rounding error). FB has such ubiquity now and no other social service comes close to matching its ease of use. The "switching cost" with respect to time involved to port friends, apps, and preferences over to another social service is way too high with respect to time-value to do so. Once your significant other gets on Facebook, you cease to care that much about other social services.

Someone made an interesting comment below about a Facebook payment service; could we seen Facebook vanity URLs replace OpenID as a payment / verification of identity solution? Maybe...on the Internet, you're no longer a dog.

Eric you are on to something with the last comment - "could we seen Facebook vanity URLs replace OpenID as a payment / verification of identity solution?" wow that blew my mind...

Hey Scott! I think you are right, there was a opportunity to make at minimal $3,000,000. On a much larger scale Facebook is probably behind the scenes working on a more powerful revenue generation model with vanity URL's and their payment system. I can just see the day where millions of users interact with a Best Buy application, and at the end they are given the option to purchase through the app (discount given!) and pay via Facebook dollars. That is pretty powerful. Companies like Paypal will probably want to think of ways to combat the on-coming frieght train of purchases on Facebook.

I would have paid $1 for www.facebook.com/jameseliason and as you know, I would glady pay for www.twitter.com/jameseliason especially if I could advertise on Twitter :)