The Orb Without: The Social Network

February 27, 2019 by Francisco Castillo

Why is it that Facebook has been growing at an unbelievable pace for the past several years?

In 2008 the company had revenues of $272 million. By the end of 2018, that figure was $55.8 billion. Within a decade, the company has grown its revenues by about 205x. A compounded annual increase of about 70%.

Could it be because of the ability of the platform to measure people’s ego and alter ego in a more precise way? With the current scientific developments of our time, I still believe it is rather impossible to quantify human emotions together with an array of qualitative factors that happen in the human brain every single second of consciousness. But, if there is a proxy to measure certain aspects of our behavior, and coincidently this tool so happens to be adopted and validated by billions of people around the world, irrespective of background, could that be better than zero? I think that with its corresponding ups and downs, people are still trying to figure this out.

On the other side of the coin. It was not until recent history that marketing departments of big corporations, and owners of small and medium size companies had access to such a powerful tool. A kind of instrument that allows you to see, almost with a molecular level of precision, not how companies are “spending” their marketing dollars in general campaigns, but how they are “investing” their resources in reaching the most efficient audiences. Groups that are the most relevant to connect with for their products or services. It could be hard to estimate just how powerful and valuable client precision is in the world of advertising and sales. 

Why is it that people hate Facebook so passionately?

Sharing information that was understood by the user to be private is definitely on top of the list, or within the top 5. But the why is what intrigues me. Could that be rooted to the idea that the company is doing something inopportune, and more importantly, without the user’s consent and to the company’s benefit?

By no means I am trying to simplify privacy issues with the following analogy; Could that anger originate from a situation similar to when an internet/cable company or a credit card company charges the customer a small one-time fee, without the customer being aware of it? It is only at that very moment when the customer realizes about the charge that he turns into a raging bull, ready to cut someone’s head off in the customer service department.

The fee could very well be described in the contract, and the company could have informed of such upcoming fee in a better way. Then perhaps we would have seen a different outcome, with a happy customer that still paid the one-time fee. But hat feeling of you being taken advantage of is very powerful, and it’s still in the bucket of emotions that are very hard to measure.

It is the lack of consent from the customer, whether right or wrong, that seems to make a world of difference. He is no longer in absolute perceived control, and in most modern instances, that is unacceptable, and someone needs to do something about it. Perhaps voice those concerns in a channel that is broad enough to bring justice. And simultaneously, a channel that is used by billions of people around the world, irrespective of background.   

How would the current orb look like without The Social Network?

Roughly and briefly speaking:

• Every day, 500,000 people around the world will have to find another way to start connecting with their friends, family, community and groups of interest through an easy to use platform.

• Current users will recourse to other ways of having everything in one place; family connections, friends’ connections, relevant groups, free international text, voice, call, videocall, etc.

• About 80 million Small and Medium Size Business will have to generate specific pages elsewhere to continue promoting their brands.

• Every hour, about 14 million photos will have to be shared with friends, family and community through other means.

• About 86% of the U.S. Marketers will have to find other means of strategic communication to promote their brands.

• Advertisers will have to find, with some luck, another venue that charges about $1.70 per click on average.

• Small and Medium-Size businesses will have to find other channels to promote their brands through videos if they don’t have access to 8 billion average daily views (equivalent to 100 million hours of video watched by users every day).

At the very least, about 2.3 billion people around the world wouldn’t have an online platform to connect and coordinate with friends and related groups. Something they have gotten used to.

Small, medium, and large businesses have also gotten used to having a relatively low-cost, very easy to use state-of-the-art marketing tool. At the very least, there may be some incentive from millions of businesses to keep the platform in optimal shape and growing.

Something that we don’t see being discussed too often is how much value does Facebook generate for advertisers? If businesses are investing upwards of $50 billion a year, a good portion must be getting their money’s worth. For the past 15 years millions and then billions of individuals have relied on this personal resource of connectivity and expression. They use it in such a monotonous and recurrent way that maybe for a good majority it has become a very relevant and essential part of their daily lives. The wise words of Dr. Asimov come to mind when he was describing the clock we live on, in the end “Habit is habit”.