Anyone who develops for the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store knows about the fees that both platforms charge. If you have in-app purchases on your app, you’ll pay a fair chunk of the revenue to the platform. According to TechCrunch, Facebook created its own site to avoid paying Apple and Google fees.
Facebook made a site to buy Stars
When you watch a live stream on Facebook, you have the ability to buy Stars to help support the creator. These are like Bits for Twitch streams. When buying the Stars, you would go through the app you’re using. A portion of the money you spend would actually go to either Apple or Google.
Facebook wants to avoid these fees and made its own site to buy Stars. This way, the company can keep more of the money. While this is true, most people may just keep with the standard way of paying to keep things simple.
Facebook has a perk for people who use its site
In case people don’t want to switch over to Facebook’s method of payment, the company has a trick up its sleeve. If a user opts to use Facebook’s method, they will be rewarded with extra Stars.
Normally, Spending $.99 would get you 45 stars, but there will be a bonus 35 stars added on. Buying 1,500 stars will get you a 940-star bonus and buying 6,400 stars will give you a 3,600-star bonus.
This is for a limited time, however
Some of these bonuses nearly double the original amount of Stars which sounds incredible, but all good things must come to an end. Right now, Facebook is having an event called “Stars FEST”, and this is why all of the bonuses are so high.
When the event is finished, we may either see diminished bonuses or no bonuses at all. Right now, this event is just to raise awareness about the new site and get people to use it. After the event is over, and the bonuses are gone, only the social media site will benefit from people using its store.
Only time will tell if there will be any sort of bonus after this is all said and done. Honestly, if Facebook keeps some sort of bonus up (it doesn’t have to be as high as it is now), then it should still be able to steer some people toward its store.
The Stars FEST will last through the rest of December. This means that we’ll know more information when January comes.
2021-12-09 15:06:14