Alex Hern - Facebook is making more and more money from you. Should you be paid for it?
If you’ve been using Facebook recently, it may be time to
ask for a raise. According to new figures
from market-research website eMarketer, you’ve made the company over 20%
more this year than you did in 2014. The average Facebook user
now generates $12.76 in advertising revenue every year, according to the
analytics firm, up from $10.03 the year before. That figure is expected to rise
still further, to $17.50 in 2017.
If you don’t use Facebook, you may be earning Twitter money
instead. The company makes $7.75 per user, up from $5.48 last year, and its
average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to almost double over the next few
years, to $12.56 in 2017.
Where you are matters an awful lot to how valuable you are
to social networks, however. Break down the difference between Americans and
the rest of the world, and it becomes immediately obvious why the US receives
the bulk of the attention from Facebook and Twitter. While one Facebook user
outside the US will make the site $7.71 this year, an American on the same site
will earn it a whopping $48.76. A similar discrepancy exists for Twitter: ARPU
is $3.51 everywhere but America, and $24.48 there.
Where will that extra money come from? Two places:
advertisers paying more to sell products on social networks, and social
networks working out more ways to show you adverts. It may seem like Facebook
and Twitter have reached saturation point on the number of adverts they
display, but with both sites constantly developing new products, there will
always be new places to put ads.
As for advertisers paying more, that too can come for two
reasons: supply and demand. As the opportunities for advertising directly to
consumers shrink, with the death of print, the decline of broadcast media, and
the rise of adblockers. Conversely, social networks are offering
better and better deals to advertisers. The more information a site has on a
specific user, the more valuable the ad space on their screen, and new and
innovative styles of adverts also encourage advertisers to spend more (see, for
instance, video adverts on both Facebook and Twitter for one example).
Of course, Facebook doesn’t actually pay you for all the
money you make it. But some have argued that it should: musician
and internet theorist Jaron Lanier argues that for every piece of data
we hand over to “spy agencies”, as he calls Facebook and Google, we should be
compensated.
“The reason that monetising information is crucial, is that
it’s the only path that creates moderation. People talk about rights and
regulation. My concern is that those things can never keep up with computer
programmers. Programmers move faster than the law. But monetising will do it,” he
told Channel 4 in 2013.
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