Olivia Solon - How Facebook plans to take over the world
The scale of
Facebook’s audience is unprecedented. More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook
at least once a month, or half of all internet users. That’s before you count
users on other Facebook-owned sites including WhatsApp, which has
more than 1 billion monthly active users, and photo-sharing site Instagram,
which has 400 million.
Facebook has also
introduced its free
basics service to 37 countries, offering a free but limited package of apps
to mobile phone users, but which some critics say allows Facebook to tightly
control the online experience of potentially the next billion people to come
online.
“You hear all the
platitudes about Facebook connecting the planet, but to say they are doing it
for benevolent reasons is absolute nonsense. It’s about connecting commerce,
not people,” says venture capitalist and former journalist Om Malik, who
reminds us of the hidden agenda of social networking firms: if you’re not
paying, you’re the product.
Facebook – which made
$5.8bn of revenue in the last three months of 2015 – is able to make money from
its users not just because of that unprecedented audience, but the amount of
time they spend on the service. In the US the average 18- to 34-year-old spends
30 hours per month on social networking services, and 26 of those are on
Facebook, according to analysts at ComScore.
Every click, every
like, every comment and every connection is used to build up a rich profile of
each user. Brands can then pay Facebook to target users based on their age,
location, relationship status and interests. This is how Facebook makes its
money – profiles of us that advertisers adore.
On the Facebook platform, the glue that
keeps everyone hanging around is “content”. The first phase was personal – our
status updates, thoughts, feelings and witty punditry, but we quickly learned
that our friends weren’t as interesting as we thought. The second phase was
photos. The rise of smartphones meant that everyone had a camera in their
pocket and a newfound belief that a single image could tell a thousand words
about their latte or hotdog legs. But not everyone is a great photographer…
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