Will Facebook Soon Start Paying Me?

Facebook has access to over 1 billion users information; they know what we like, our interests, even what groups we belong to and so on.  For advertisers, Facebook is a gold mine, companies can directly figure out which people are interested in their products, however for some reason advertisers have been reluctant to advertise with Facebook.

Right now Facebook makes only $1.28 per each user per quarter, which is much less than the $7.00 Google makes on each of its users.  Facebook’s stock is also worth half of what it was when it first started trading in May, mainly because investors are afraid than the social media tool lacks a clear path of increasing revenue it makes off of the subscribers.

A couple of NYU professors have begun proposing a strategy for Facebook that consists of Facebook paying its users for the privilege of selling their information.   This idea isn’t new; Facebook would pay its users a fee of say $10 a month for the right to send their relevant personal information to the advertisers.  Companies looking to advertise their products or brands to a specific group of people would pay Facebook for that data and for the ability to directly market to those individuals.



Facebook has made no comment regarding this issue, and honestly paying a billion users a month seems pretty expensive and also very tricky to do.  Theoretically this concept seems like it could work, but logistically it would be very difficult and complicated I think.  However it would be pretty nice to get compensated for using Facebook, but I guess everyone will just have to wait and see!



Reference: http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/technology/social/facebook-should-pay-you/index.html?iid=SF_T_River