Facebook today announced that subscription payments are now available to all developers with apps on the site.

The company originally announced the program in beta with Zynga, Playdom and Kixeye as partners in June. Now any developer can offer subscriptions for virtual goods, premium experiences or updated content within their apps for a monthly fee.

Developers can set different prices based on a user’s local currency and offer different levels of subscriptions. They can also offer free trial periods. This flexibility could help developers better monetize their apps. The model could also lead players to spend more in games and also makes Facebook a better option for developers of free-to-play browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It might also be a start to getting non-game developers to try the social network’s payment platform. For example, professional networking app BranchOut or news apps like Washington Post Social Reader might find uses for subscriptions. However, Facebook will take a 30 percent fee from these transactions.

Developers can combine subscriptions and in-app payments. For instance, a game might offer a monthly subscription for energy or supplies and sell vanity items through in-app purchases. Users can pay for subscriptions with a credit card or PayPal account, and they can cancel from their Facebook payment settings. Facebook recommends that developers provide a cancel option from within their apps as well.

Developers can learn more about implementing subscription payments here. Daily transaction data about subscriptions will be available for download through the payments reporting API introduced on Monday.

See an example of subscriptions in Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time below.

Online gambling company Gamesys today launches Bingo Friendzy for Facebook, the first casino title to incorporate real-money play on the social network.

Real-money gambling is illegal in the U.S., but if Facebook allows more of these games in other countries, it could be a significant source of payments revenue. Facebook reported $192 million in revenue from games and other payments in the second quarter of 2012, but that was only a 3.6 percent increase from the same period in 2011.

Unlike in the U.S., gambling is a part of the U.K. culture and it’s comparatively easy to operate an online gambling site/app on a global scale. Last month, Christopher Griffin told our sister blog Inside Social Games that his real-money gaming platform Betable is able to operate worldwide because the company’s servers are in the U.K. and the country’s laws allow them to operate anywhere in the world, except in those nations where online gambling is explicitly forbidden.

With Facebook’s age-gating and geo-location technology, Bingo Frenzy and its corresponding News Feed stories will not be visible to users under 18 years old or anyone outside of the U.K.

Real-money gaming is still illegal in the United States because of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, although there are exceptions in the states of Nevada and New Jersey. Many in the industry expect the law to be overturned within the next few years. That said, more and more studios are launching social casino apps on Facebook because they tend to have stronger monetization and retention rates than standard arcade titles. Developers like Zynga and Idle Games have recently gone on record  to say they’re positioned to take advantage of real-money gaming when it’s legalized in North America, and it also seems likely that casino groups like IGT Interactive, Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts are poised to do so as well.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said, “Facebook is a place that allows people to connect and share. Real money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the U.K. and we are allowing a partner to offer their games to adult users on the Facebook platform in a safe and controlled manner.”

Gamesys, which also operates the popular Bingo and slots website jackpotjoy in the U.K., requires users to be above the age of 18 years old to play. Bingo Friendzy contains 90 different Bell Bingo and slots games, and The Telegraph reports players need credit cards to play instead of soft/hard currency.

A version of this article originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

Facebook today announced that it has launched a payments reporting API to allow developers to download daily reports of transaction data, instead of receiving that information through email.

Facebook says the new system, which is available beginning today, will be more reliable, secure and flexible. The API has built-in checks to ensure developers receive all the data. The new report is formatted as a structured csv file, instead of the former flat tsv file. Developers are likely to find this more useful than emails. Previously only one person from a company could receive the payments report. Now multiple people can download the report. It will also allow developers to better integrate transaction data into their own systems, and with the csv file, it will continue to work regardless of whether Facebook adds more data fields in the future.

This API will also support Facebook’s transition away from Credits to local currency later this year and subscription payments. Details about how to implement the API are available here. The payments reporting API can be downloaded securely via https using an OAuth-secured HTTP interface. Facebook will stop sending daily email reports on Nov. 7.

More users are accessing Facebook from their phones than ever before, but during Thursday’s earnings call the company blamed a slowdown in both payments and ad sales on the shift to mobile.

Facebook’s revenues from payments increased by a scant 3.6 percent quarter-over-quarter, rising from $186 million in Q1 2012 to $192 million in Q2 2012, something CFO David Ebersman blamed on the shift to mobile gaming, and to platforms Facebook can’t monetize on. Facebook has tried to address the issue by developing its own HTML5-based mobile platform, but the technical issues surrounding HTML5 and poor discoverability in its platform have hampered its efforts.

In June game developer Wooga announced it would no longer distribute HTML5 games on Facebook, and was making its experimental HTML5 game Pocket Island open source. According to Wooga’s blog post, “installs were initially very low, as users struggled to find the game page… retention rates remained exceedingly low with around 5 percent of users returning to play the next day.”

It was a similar story with advertising. Revenues for Q2 were up 13.8 percent quarter-over-quarter to $992 million, but the total amount of ads Facebook delivered during the quarter actually declined.

“The overall number of ads delivered in the U.S. this quarter decreased two percent year-over-year despite a 10 percent increase in daily users and despite the increase in ads per page as daily web users in the U.S. declined in favor of mobile users, and we are seeing similar trends in other developed markets,” Ebersman said during the earnings call.

That shift is bad news for Facebook, as display advertising makes up the lion’s share of Facebook’s revenue stream, accounting for 83 percent of its total earnings in Q2.

During its second quarter earnings call, Facebook reported it now has 543 million monthly active users on mobile, an increase of 67 percent year-over-year and 11.2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Although the company did not reveal what percentage of its mobile users access the service through its iOS, Android and feature phone apps, we estimate there are about 95 million active feature phone users on the social network, based on analysis from the Facebook ad tool. In March, the company reported it had 83 million members who only accessed its site through its mobile apps or mobile website.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Unilever today launched a charitable Facebook app called Waterworks, which integrates Open Graph and the social network’s new subscription billing option to raise money and awareness to help bring clean drinking water to areas in need.

Users connect the Waterworks application, allowing permission to post to Timeline, and set a daily donation between $0.10 and $1.00. Users are paired with “Waterworkers,” women in water-poor communities who help distribute water purifiers and sachets of drinking water. Each Waterworker is given a mobile phone that includes a custom Waterworks app to allow her to share photos and stories that will show up within the Facebook user’s app and through notifications. Stories will be published to News Feed and Timeline about the progress a user’s donations have made.

The innovative app was produced by Betapond, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer that had early access to APIs announced this week, including subscription payments and the new Open Graph-enabled Like action. Betapond says Facebook agreed to take a 5 percent transaction fee rather than its traditional 30 percent. As we’ve written about previously, the social network has a history of working closely with charitable organizations, and groups that are looking to run large-scale campaigns to support a cause should consider talking to Facebook directly or working with a Preferred Marketing Developer that has a close relationship with the company.

Facebook has updated its payment terms for both users and developers following Tuesday’s announcement that it would support monthly subscription billing for apps and games on its platform and phase out Credits in favor of a user’s local currency.

Note that Facebook’s transition from Credits to local currency is not an indication that the social network is getting out of the payments business. In fact, it is expanding it to be more similar to Apple’s iTunes App Store model, rather than emphasizing virtual currency. This should give Facebook more flexibility as it looks to monetize apps beyond games.

Overall, the new policies are more comprehensive and better organized, which is important as the number of users and developers who use Facebook’s payments platform expands over the next year to include more non-game transactions.

For users, the social network added more information and terms about various payment methods, and made it clearer that users under 18 cannot use Facebook Payments only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. The age stipulation was previously one of the final points on the user terms page. Now it is in the second paragraph. The payment methods section, including a definition of Facebook Credits, is completely new.

In the new payment methods section, the company expanded its payments terms to explain its policy around gift cards and introduced terms around mobile billing. For example, Facebook noted that it is not a bank and that gift card balances are not deposits and do not earn interest. Surprisingly, Facebook didn’t make any mention of mobile billing in its previous policy. The social network recently rolled out a two-step payments flow for mobile apps, but has supported mobile carrier billing for years.

Readers can compare Facebook’s new user payment terms with its previous policy from March 27 here.

For developers, Facebook changed its “Facebook Credits Terms” to the new brand of “Facebook Developer Payment Terms.” The terms page now includes more explanation of payouts and introduces the term “developer balance.”  Whenever developers complete a sale on the platform, Facebook will credit the proceeds, minus a 30 percent service fee, to a developer’s balance. The new policy is reorganized with clearer headlines and explanations, for example, including a section called “Your Responsibilities and Risks.” The section compiles conditions that were previously incorporated into several different areas of the document.

Developers can compare Facebook’s new developer payment terms with its previous credits policy from November 2011 here.

Facebook today begins rolling out a new mobile payments flow that brings the number of steps down from seven to two, the company said in a blog post.

The new carrier billing option, announced in February, is now live for the U.S. and the U.K., but will be available worldwide soon. Mobile app developers will be able to charge their players’ monthly phone bills in only two steps and without requiring users to type anything. Having a fluid payments flow could encourage developers to focus more attention on HTML5 applications than they have in the past.

Mobile web developers who already integrate Facebook payments don’t need to make any changes to their apps. Those who want to use Credits on their mobile website can use Facebook’s Payments API. Developers can see an example of the payments flow in Gamzee’s Skyscraper City.

Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodaphone, Orange, O2 and Three will support mobile payments for users in the U.S. and the U.K. A list of participating carriers by country is available here. Though it’s hard to be sure exactly what percentage of its revenue share Facebook is giving up to facilitate the new payment option, the company could be losing a substantial portion of its 30 percent cut. Earlier this year Ray Anderson, the chief executive of carrier billing company and Facebook service partner Bango, revealed carriers often provide large company like Facebook with much more favorable carrier billing terms than smaller players receive. However, even with some carriers now remitting 90 percent of carrier billing revenue, by the time Facebook pays the carrier and any third-party payment processers, it could be losing up to half its share. We suspect the company is willing to make the sacrifice to bolster HTML5 applications and work around the barriers Apple and Google have set up to prevent Facebook from monetizing native apps that integrate its platform.

The social network is also beginning to monetize its own mobile app with advertising. On Tuesday the company announced that advertisers can now choose to run mobile-only ads, which introduces new opportunities for app developers to acquire users with Sponsored Stories.

This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.

For Part 2 of our series, we spoke with Milyoni founder and CEO John Corpus. Milyoni is the Facebook commerce and social entertainment company best known for making films and live events available for streaming on the social network.

Seeing the potential of Facebook

Three years ago when Corpus was CIO of Mervyns department store, he saw the rapid growth of Facebook as an opportunity for commerce. At the time, the social network had about 150 million users. Although that is far less than the more than 900 million using the site now, it was a major milestone in 2009. Corpus says the growth was especially interesting when compared with trends showing that online display and search conversions were declining.

“The three rules of retail are location, location, location,” Corpus says. “Facebook was where people were spending more time.”

He says it was the amount of interaction and the speed of sharing happening on the site that stood out and led him to want to build a company on the platform.

Developing a business idea

When Corpus founded Milyoni (pronounced “million-eye”) in February 2009, the company was focused on helping businesses sell physical goods. Milyoni offered the “iFanStore,” an e-commerce platform for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. It was one of the few e-commerce apps that let users stay within Facebook during an entire transaction and then share their activity with friends.

The company gained a lot of entertainment-focused clients, including HBO, the NBA, UFC and The Onion. These companies were selling things like t-shirts and DVDs through the app. But Corpus says that a conversation with Warner Bros., at the end of 2010, led to a whole new market: digital goods.

Milyoni and Warner Bros. were discussing how video was incorporated in the app when an executive asked whether a full feature could be shared on Facebook. The companies decided to try it, and in March 2011, they made “The Dark Knight” available for streaming on Facebook with users paying for the rental using Facebook’s platform currency, Credits. The success of that test and others led Milyoni to develop what it calls “Social Cinema” for movies and “Social Live” for things like concerts and sporting events. The company is now primarily focused on these areas rather than selling physical goods through Facebook.

Confidence in Facebook

Corpus says Milyoni could expand to other platforms in the future, but for now it’s focused on Facebook.

“This is not a fly-by-night type of business,” Corpus says, pointing to Facebook’s latest user numbers and engagement statistics, which includes 300 million photo uploads and 3.2 billion Likes per day. “From a foundational standpoint, they’re here to stay.”

Milyoni’s own success on the platform is further proof for Corpus, who says Facebook users have watched more than 700,000 minutes of Milyoni content in the past three months. The company now offers more than 150 titles from 16 studios available on Facebook, and it plans to bring 700 more titles and 30 more live events to the platform this year.

Facebook’s future

To capitalize on the social network’s growth in users and engagement, Facebook now has to focus on growing its revenue streams through advertising, mobile and commerce, Corpus says. Social games were a good start, but he says there is a lot more opportunity around social entertainment where studios and other content providers can connect directly with their consumers.

Facebook’s payments revenue was $186 million in the first quarter of 2012, up 98 percent compared to the first quarter of 2011 when Credits were not mandatory for social games transactions. However, most of that revenue is still from sales of virtual goods, not digital goods or experiences. Milyoni is one of the few companies helping to pioneer the use of Credits outside the realm of games. Corpus says the social network needs to do more to get users to understand Credits so that they are more comfortable using the currency and spending money within apps. He sites PayPal as an example of another company that took a few years before it was widely considered secure. Corpus says that making it easier for users to see and manage their Credits accounts could help Facebook in this area.

“They have to let people know it’s not just Monopoly money,” Corpus says. “They have to provide people with a level of confidence and security to make it a more trustworthy place.”

Read Part 1 of our series, which profiles Clara Shih of social marketing software company Hearsay Social.

Facebook acknowledged in a regulatory filing that it might reduce the percentage fee it takes from developers building on its platform if it expands its payments business beyond games.

Currently, the social network requires social games to use Facebook Credits, of which it takes a 30 percent cut of revenue when players buy virtual goods. Some developers have experimented with using Credits for digital goods like song downloads and streaming movies, but Facebook’s currency is not mandatory for these apps.

Monday’s S-1 amendment is the first time Facebook has publicly suggested that it might change its revenue share structure. However, it is important to note that before the company goes public, it is required to include any relevant risk factors and forward-looking statements that could affect its business, however theoretical.

Nonetheless, is widely believed that Facebook will one day change this policy and require non-game applications to use Credits — “Payments,” as the program is known to investors. And while a 30 percent cut is an industry standard for revenue sharing models with developers — Apple and Google take this much from mobile app developers — it might be too high to encourage growth in areas outside of virtual goods.

For example, Spotify requires users to sign up using a Facebook account. The app benefits from prominent distribution across the social network, but so far Facebook doesn’t generate any direct revenue from the music streaming service. If the social network were to one day say to Spotify, as it did to game developers last year, that it would begin taking 30 percent of every $9.99 subscription, the music provider likely wouldn’t be able to sustain its business. However, if Facebook takes a lower percentage, then Spotify and apps from other industries might thrive from the virality of the platform and unified payment processing.

It’s very likely that Facebook’s payments infrastructure will support subscription billing in the near future, and when it does, it could allow developers to retain a greater share of revenue. Facebook has board members Don Graham and Reed Hastings, CEOs of The Washingon Post Company and Netflix, respectively, to provide insight about the type of model that would be mutually beneficial for the social network and other industries building on the platform. Those two companies, along with Spotify, would likely be launch partners if Facebook decided to provide this option.

Exactly how Facebook would decide to distinguish between games and other apps is unclear. What it might do instead is charge different percentage fees for virtual goods like decorations or power-ups versus digital goods like mp3s or livestreams. If Facebook began to support payments for physical goods, those too could fall under a different tier for revenue share. The company could also take a smaller cut of purchases over a certain dollar amount and maintain its 30 percent share of micropayments. Then again, Facebook might simply decide to take a lower percentage fee across all applications. This would give developers more incentive to build on the platform, and Facebook could overcome its loss of revenue share by operating at a larger scale than before.

Facebook shared a number of updates on its developer blog today, including new features, API changes and bug fixes.

New link makes apps easier to add – Tab application pages now include an “Add App to Page” option to make it simpler for admins to add custom tabs to their pages. The link is found in the gear menu on pages associated with page tab applications (see right). Developers can enable this feature in the advanced section of the Dev App.

Payments reports updated – Daily detail reports for developers accepting payments now include a new order type. The new “J” type is a reversal of a chargeback that happened out of the window. Facebook says this shouldn’t affect developers’ payout totals, but this gives developers data on the orders.

Fan gate bug fixed – Facebook resolved an issue that prevented fan gates — tab apps that hide content until users Like a page — from working properly when pages converted to the new Timeline design. Even though pages cannot set default landing tabs, tab apps continue to support fan-gating now that the bug has been fixed.

Time zones to be removed from events – Facebook will disable event start and end times from being returned with time zones from the Graph API as of April 1. This sounds counter to the changes to events announced Wednesday. We are awaiting clarification from Facebook.

For more details about upcoming breaking changes and a list of other bug fixes this week, see Facebook’s Developer Blog. We covered the latest changes to the Pages API in more depth here.