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“Facebook makes just a hair under $635,000 in profit for each of its 25,000 employees. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes about $158,000 per worker. (At W
by mindgam3 7y ago
“Facebook makes just a hair under $635,000 in profit for each of its 25,000 employees. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes about $158,000 per worker. (At Walmart, it’s $4,288.) These calculations often get spun as representing a victory for automation and algorithms—machines, rather than humans, creating value. But the truth is, these media companies have billions of people working for them—they’re just not on staff.”
- trpc 7y agoAt least Google's main revenue, Adsense, is shared with other people. Publishers, websites and apps that voluntarily choose their Ad service.
- anticensor 7y agoFacebook also has an ad service. Social network users contribute voluntarily too.
- trpc 7y agoThe difference is that the vast majority of users are unaware that their content is making other users stay within Facebook as long as possible and feed it with more data to make money for Facebook alone.
- Fnoord 7y agoGoogle Maps is community driven as well. I contributed to it, then I was like "wait, why am I not contributing to OSM instead?" Google does give rewards for the contributions but they're laughable compared to the amount of time you put into the work.
- skinnymuch 7y agoMost people pick Adsense because it’s the de facto service to use. Name a competitor to Adsense for your average small site that doesn’t take a lot of work or pay a lot less in aggregate. It’s not the same as truly voluntarily using it. Adsense isn’t Google’s main revenue or profit source either. That would be AdWords and specifically ads on their own properties.
- mxd3 7y agoTheir main revenue is actually Adwords.
- polskibus 7y agoThey outsource a lot of things like content filtering. It would be interesting to know the numbers including outsourcing.
- imgabe 7y agoIf they're looking at profit that should already include any expenses for outsourcing.