Facebook Should Pay All of Us

A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates -

This doesn't work for long time already. If you have liked something, you rarely see the updates anymore unless the page owners pay for Facebook. It's called Boosting now. Really sucks for small companies or communities, unless you pay - your page is dead.

For me personally, Event management is the only thing it keeps me on Facebook. Part of it's success if of course because everyone is on Facebook, which makes it easy. But again, if you're a small Facebook page owner and want to invite your loyal fans to your own event you created under your page - Good luck with inviting them, you can't - need you pay again.

Specifically, it's by email or Facebook ID.

Most likely, your friend was targeted for advertising using Facebook's custom audiences. FB let advertisers upload a list of email addresses or Facebook IDs to show ads to.

Personally, I consider this much further on the creepy scale than it is on the genuinely worrisome scale, more creepy than harmful. It's pretty creepy though, so.. relativity.

I don't trust Facebook. At one point I even deleted my account. But, FB has allowed me to get back in contact with friends I made in college and at my first job (in Panama). The reward to me has been tremendous. It has meant so much to me. Prices are not just a function of costs, but also what consumers are willing to pay.

Also I think this article over-values personal information in a world where your local supermarket, Amazon, ad networks, the government, etc. already know so much about us. In that context, you aren't giving up that much additional privacy by also sharing with Facebook -- the price you are paying may not be that great.

This will not change until regulators step in and force companies to disclose what they store, how they use it and most importantly, what behaviors they are actively attempting to coerce their users into.

Much like the agriculture industry, tech companies that deal in user data use the shield of trade secrets, NDAs, lobbying etc to hide their actions from the public as they all know that if they general public knew what they were truly doing, they would have a much more difficult choice when deciding upon using that service.

It's not that users don't care or think they are getting a good value for their information, it's that users have so little information about how it is being used.

Ugh, ridiculous title that is barely touched upon at all, and when it does mention it, doesn't actually explain how or why the proposition 'FB should pay us' makes sense. Why write an article titled with a proposition that you do not at all go into?

tl;dr: FB makes money on our data, so we're 'paying' FB with our data, something that's no secret and everyone who ever cared knows and easily finds out.

It doesn't relate to the title of the article at all. The only thought mentioned is that if we're giving FB our data, then we must get rewarded for it, or 'paid', while blatantly ignoring the obvious, that the use of FB for free is that reward.

Ironically, this article is entirely driven by an event that the writer mentioned about how a sociologist offered to pay FB with actual money, rather than data. This sociologist keeps getting mentioned which one can summarise with 'such a thought-provoking thing to do, exposing the relationship between your data and FB's business model', as if it's anything new.

Yet the writer misses the point which is why it's ironic: the sociologist offered to pay actual money because guess what, FB is actually providing a product, one of communication, news, media, information, entertainment, connectivity, networking, debate, that has genuine value.

And so the notion that FB has to pay money to people for providing them a free service that they value, is ridiculous. It's the consumer who has to pay, and they happen to do it through data instead of money. You can question if they should, but that's not what the article is about.

The only way the writer's article makes sense is if FB was a data collecting agency who did absolutely nothing but provide a form on their website where you could fill in all your data, while somehow verifying it's truthful data, then selling that data to other companies, and offering you nothing in return. Indeed it would make sense then for FB to pay you money for that data.

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Anyway, a different discussion I was hoping some people had some insights into for me to read is this... One thing I'd be curious about, is if anyone has any data on the actual value/impact of FB's data on their advertising revenue, versus their service simply being extremely well used and thereby driving a lot of revenue.

After all, FB's average revenue per user is something like 15% of that of a Google user, despite FB reaching ridiculously high levels of daily use, activity, minutes spent, sessions, engagement etc. So where FB has some of the most granular per-customer data ever to drive ads, and has some of the highest activity per user (and thereby, ability to show ads over and over through tons of sessions), they're trailing pretty far. You'd think that their ARPU is more driven by simply being extremely popular (data or no data), than offering advertisers the best data-driven advertising platform.

Surely a big part of it can be explained by maturity, their ARPU is growing faster than Google's so they're slowly catching up, and it's true that Google's data isn't exactly poor either of course. But still, contrary to common belief, common sense and intuition, it doesn't seem their revenue indicates their data position is all that valuable (yet). Would love other people's thoughts and insights on this.