Facebook is more a home page now, it’s our default page, it’s become an internet within the Internet. The way online newspaper articles have started to function on Facebook offers some interesting respite, but in general it’s an easy way to pass a spare five minutes – or hour; it leaves your brain unengaged, while you think you’re actually doing something. Apparently we spend an average of 23 minutes there per visit.
It is incredible though. I think most people spend more time socialising on Facebook then they do in person and some people are more comfortable online than they are off it.
A conservative estimate sees an average American spend seven and a half hours on Facebook every month, whereas the web brand with the greatest Internet audience, Google, sees an average spend of just over an hour and a half. Wikipedia sees just 18 minutes.
And rightly, for the amount of time we 800 million users spend on there, Facebook makes millions. Their profits for 2011 have amounted to over $4,000 million with a total profit over the years of double that. Creator Mark Zuckerberg was Time’s Person of the Year for 2010, the movie about him won 3 Oscars, and even Goldman Sachs has begun raising $1,500 million from its favourite investors on behalf of the social networking company. All signs seem to be pointing upwards for Facebook.
But what does Facebook actually do? What role does it play? How does it earn its money?
Facebook does nothing. It may provide a platform, but Facebook produces nothing. We are the sole contributors. We are Facebook.
The majority of websites out there that depend on advertising money to survive, as Facebook does, and operate in a world where the number of clicks, time spent on page and time spent on website matters. Sites produce fresh content daily so viewers will spend longer with them. The longer viewers spend enjoying their content, the more money websites will be able to charge advertisers.
Doesn’t it seem unfair that while we produce every bit of content on Facebook, it has raked in $4,000 million for 2011 alone? Don’t we have a right to some of that money?
Of course not. The disclaimer hands over our right to any images we upload, posts we send, messages; everything we input to Facebook now belongs to Facebook. An average user creates 90 pieces of content each month and there are now more than 800 million users – that’s 72,000 million fresh bits of content every month (72,000,000,000) that belongs to Facebook. We are all tiny bloggers, content providers, in this massive, global project.
Usually, magazines and websites which profit from other peoples’ efforts tend to compensate them for their time (material), Facebook doesn’t.
But imagine it did – imagine a new Facebook gave back: every time a user clicked on an advert whilst on your profile page, you were given a slice of the £1+ advertising fee. What if that slice was 50% and you received 50p every time someone clicked an advert while on your profile page. Would this act as an incentive for people to add more content; upload more pictures; write on more walls; add more friends and have more viewers? This might be an unwelcome suggestion to those who don’t like the way Facebook is being played out anyway, but from the company’s end of things, the more the merrier. Wouldn’t a company offering this kind of deal get their users to churn out more content? Wouldn’t a company offering this kind of deal be able to turn millions of users from Facebook?
No one needs to create a jaw-dropping reinvention to rival anything; someone just needs to do exactly what Facebook’s doing, but slightly better.
Social Networks are by their nature temporary, yet the aim is to create the illusion that it’s permanent, invincible, that it’s too big to fail – it simply has too many members; you have to stay with them. With the way Facebook is considering itself, it has gone about as far as any of the others did in creating this illusion, far further than Myspace did and look what happened there. Facebook’s new timeline layout has our profiles presented as if they’re an accurate record of our existence.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook is hoping its IPO, which has been long rumoured, would value the company at around $100,000 million (100,000,000,000). Facebook’s being valued as if it will be our permanent means for identifying ourselves. Looking to the past, this won’t be the case.
If you were there for AOL and then AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Hi5, Bebo, Habbo or MySpace, you might have believed the same thing about any one of those social networks. Remember when those CD Roms from AOL littered your front doormat and your computer desk? At one point during this period more than 50% of all CDs created in the world were for this AOL campaign. The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less talented than Mark Zuckerberg. But AOL fell, from a $220,000 million valuation to a $20,000 million valuation in a few years; from 26 million users, to 4 million.
Consider two possibilities. Firstly, a new Facebook type social network appears, identical to Facebook, but where the profits go directly back to the contributors. You get a slice of the pie you help to make. Secondly, a similar social networking site appears where a large portion of the profits goes to charities. The charities are picked and voted for by the user base. Would you stay with Facebook if you had the option of switching to either?
There’s a growing focus on corporate social responsibility – where a company’s profits are being directed – and consequently, a growing trend for companies to be transparent and to contribute more. The rise in ethical consumerism has lead to companies making ethic-based associations, all of which has been fuelled by the speed with which we can share business information: the Internet. Companies are engaging far more with charities and social enterprises (as they offer strategic legitimacy), while shoppers, instead of asking ‘what am I getting for this product?’ are asking ‘where is my money going?’
A third of us now in the UK would be willing to spend a 10% price premium on ethical products, while companies such as Bloomberg and Reuters have begun to supply ESG (ethical, social and governance) ratings direct to the financial data screens of thousands of stock market traders, adding to the growing popularity and quoting of ethical-ratings publications such as Ethical Consumer in the UK and Green America. These publications produce annual ratings of companies’ ethics based on five main categories: animals, the environment, people, politics and sustainability.
This has seen many companies seek to outdo each other morally; taking their ethics to the consumer on the front-line through advertising, as opposed to solely on their websites; using the company’s ethics to stand-in as the company’s primary identity.
The more people support them, the more good they can do. This may have lead, negatively, to companies commoditising charitable efforts to drive sales, but at the least it shows an awareness of change in consumer attitude.
We are growing a consciousness to our choices in the marketplace; how we as consumers are affecting the world on a day-to-day basis. Whether it’s positive buying through Fairtrade, or companies such as One, or negative boycotting – as there are far more choices in the marketplace and so many similar products being sold by a variety of companies – we are becoming interested in the makeup of a product’s company as well as the product itself.
Facebook will not escape this consciousness. The faster it grows, the more impact it will have on the world stage and hence the more its contributors will question their involvement in it; our propping it up. And as soon as there’s something worth fighting for (moving for) we will.
Social media is as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub, party. It’s the people that matter, not the venue. We don’t go to Facebook for Facebook – for the ambience, the vibe, the colours – we go to Facebook because that’s where the people that matter to us are. And when the trend leaders begin to feel that the place has lost its lustre, its energy, its modernity and of course, its exclusivity, they’ll move on to the next one, taking their affiliations with them. And don’t doubt that there will be an easy migration tool through which you’ll be able to bring your friends, maybe even photos, pages, likes, apps etc. Maybe you won’t even care to; maybe you’ll welcome the fresh slate.
People talk about Facebook as if it will always be there, as if it’s the Yellow Pages of social networking or a passport: it is official; it is a real representation of who we are online; it’s as close to an identity card as we can have. But can’t we be represented in a better way? What does Facebook actually do? Where is my contribution going?
We’ll move on – just as we did from the chat rooms and the MSN Messengers – without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal and nebulous as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to our local pubs, our restaurants, our cafes. We don’t live there, we don’t know the owner, the staff, there’s no sentimentality to any of it, no rapport with the setup, there’s no historical or cultural significance – it means nothing to us. And we are all the more ready to question the latest changes to privacy policy, all the more annoyed to learn that every one of our social connections has been sold to the highest corporate bidder.
Facebook’s profits have stacked up: it’s got ten times more dollars than it has users, and I haven’t even been thanked. I’ve been a loyal server for five years now – I was practically there since the UK beginning – God knows how many hours or contributions (no doubt this is knowledge somewhere, to someone). And through all of this it hasn’t even told me how it’s going to spend the profit I’ve helped to make – not a word. Surely I should have some kind of say? I want something more from a site I contribute so much to; from a site which profits so much from the material I provide.
The longer Facebook maintains astronomical profits without alienating its user base, the longer it can put off the inevitable decline. But considering it continues to leave its content-providing workforce unengaged with the results of their efforts, Facebook – as susceptible to competition as anything else – might have to start looking over its shoulder for another provider that will.
