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posted by Woods on Monday July 28 2014, @11:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the cash-out-while-you-are-ahead dept.

The Register reports:

You're not worth $US10 a year to Mark Zuckerberg actually, just a bit less. That's one of the many factoids revealed in The Social Network's new Form 10-Q [PDF] filed last Friday.

One item of interest is that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has decided not to investigate Facebook's 2012 float.

The 10-Q states that "In May 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notified us that it had terminated its inquiry and that no enforcement action had been recommended". The filing also notes that Facebook is "also party to various legal proceedings and claims that arise in the ordinary course of business," including some legal fun with patent trolls / non-practicing entities. Facebook is shrugging off those actions, stating "we believe that the amount or estimable range of reasonably possible loss will not, either individually or in the aggregate, have a material adverse effect on our business".

Another interesting factoid in the filing points out the USA remains the dominant source of cash for the company, with $US1.26bn of the $2.91bn brought in during the 30 days to June 30th coming from the land of the free. There's no other line item for nations as sources of revenue because "No individual country exceeded 10% of our total revenue for any period presented."

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Dunbal on Monday July 28 2014, @11:32PM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Monday July 28 2014, @11:32PM (#74812)

    How can I actually start costing him money? What can I do?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bugamn on Tuesday July 29 2014, @12:49AM

      by bugamn (1017) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @12:49AM (#74827)

      Maybe you could not use Facebook?

      • (Score: 3) by Tork on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:10AM

        by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:10AM (#74889)
        Costing and 'not paying' are not the same thing. That's why boycotting EA did nothing to change their DRM policy but 1,500 with 1 star Amazon reviews did. You 'vote-with-your-wallet' peeps live in a fantasy world.
        --
        🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
        • (Score: 2) by bugamn on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:08AM

          by bugamn (1017) on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:08AM (#75332)

          As far as I know, the users define Facebook's worth. The loss of one user might be worth a lot less than a cent, but it still costs then. Once upon a time there was MySpace, but it lost users.

          Of course, if you can give better suggestions I would love to hear them.

          • (Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:12AM

            by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:12AM (#75352)
            "The loss of one user might be worth a lot less than a cent, but it still costs then."

            In the context of what the person was asking, no, it doesn't cost them, they just don't earn that money. Now you may call that pedantic, and you would be right, but the reason I'm making the distinction is that he may not have a Facebook account and would like to flip the bird at them. Also, frankly, they could lose customers for a million other reasons besides this one. Actively sending a message by costing more than they don't earn will have a bigger impact. Again, I refer to what happened with EA and their DRM.
            --
            🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
      • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:33AM

        by isostatic (365) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:33AM (#74905) Journal

        That costs him money in the same way that copying a film costs a studio money.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:45AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:45AM (#74907)

          Nope, that costs him money the same way as not watching a film at all costs a studio money. There's a difference. If those are the options and there's no chance of getting you pay for it they'd rather have you freeload it and that way get some of your friends pay instead.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @12:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @12:57AM (#74831)

      > How can I actually start costing him money? What can I do?

      Tag photos with the wrong identities. Their facial recognition database relies on human oversight. If you provide bad oversight then it makes the identification algorithms less accurate. They probably have statistical methods to filter out some bad actors, but the more people who screw with it, the harder it will be to filter them out. You should probably also consistently tag some people correctly, if none of your tags match anyone else's tagging you will be easy to filter out. Try to only do it to people you don't like.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:26AM

      by Horse With Stripes (577) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:26AM (#74836)

      If you use Facebook and AdBlock (or some variation thereof) then you're probably already costing him money (though not as much as $10 per year).

      • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:53AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:53AM (#74884)

        Not likely. A piece of your soul is worth more than their bandwidth and cpu costs.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:35AM

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:35AM (#74872) Journal

      Use AWS instance and the facebook api to wget all the photos of your friends and friends of friends. Either output the results to /dev/null or upload it to your album on facebook. Make that a cron job too.

      Or do something like this:

      while(true){
          int * img_ptr = makeRandomJpeg();
          char * pageAddress = upload(IMG_ptr);
          tagRandomFriend(pageAddress);
      }

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:39AM (#74875)

      > How can I actually start costing him money? What can I do?

      Work on a facebook killer.

      Something like diaspora but more fine-grained so that anyone can run their own personal node on their phone where 'friends' all cache each other's data on their phones for redundancy and speed (chances are somebody in your circle of friends is going to be on wifi so bandwidth charges won't be big worry).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:06AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:06AM (#74888)

      Use his site in as antisocial ways as you can get away with, with the intent of eventually getting as many of your friends as possible to leave it.
      This is a risky idea though. Should you fail you've just made him more money.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @10:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @10:59AM (#74927)

      Help all your non-techie friends install adblock.
      Noscript and ghostery are painful for them, because until you white list stuff they break sites, but adblock just works.
      It reduces their downloads (good for those on fixed plans) and speeds things up for those on slow connections. Best of all it fucks turds like zuckerberg.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @11:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @11:40PM (#74815)

    This is bad news for poor people. One of the big arguments in favor of the ad-supported internet business model is that people who are too poor to pay for access can still get access because advertising makes it available to everyone.

    Except that all the Big Data analysis and "targeted" advertising systems are at the point where they can reasonably predict how much disposable income you have. That means a kid in the slums of Mumbai who has nearly zero disposable income can be distinguished from the kid living in the Bel Air suburb of Los Angeles. It is only a matter of time before ad systems start to reduce payments for ads shown to people with little disposable income and eventually websites that depend on that money will decide to save those fractional pennies by just blocking people that the ad networks don't want to pay for.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:46AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:46AM (#74952)

      There's also narrowcasting, like TV does. Maybe 29 out of 30 people won't watch reality TV. (This is actually a fairly accurate estimate based on ratings vs population) The strategy is not to broadcast something almost everyone appreciates (pr0n?) but maximize satisfaction for a very small audience. Televised pro sports are another example, where the production style is obnoxious to most people, but the hard core fan likes it quite a bit. Also see agitprop aka infotainment aka news.

      So in your bel air example you'd have, perhaps, a site for restaurant and skateboard shops in bel air. Mumbai simply won't have targeted websites for skateboard shops and restaurants. No need to block them.

      Rotating back to my TV example, ESPN has no interest at all in appealing to me. Thats OK. They don't need to actively block me, I just don't watch that channel.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Tramii on Monday July 28 2014, @11:41PM

    by Tramii (920) on Monday July 28 2014, @11:41PM (#74816)

    Can someone translate this article for me? I have no idea what it's saying.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by e_armadillo on Monday July 28 2014, @11:53PM

      by e_armadillo (3695) on Monday July 28 2014, @11:53PM (#74819)

      Zuckerberg's a douche, but I am not sure. I mean why waste an article saying something THAT obvious? :-)

      --
      "How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:25AM (#74849)

      Facebook filed its quarterly report, which the government requires of all companies who have stock on the stock market. In this report, Facebook reported that they are not in any serious legal trouble and don't expect to be in any serious legal trouble.

      The poster also divided the company's income by the number of its users, and he figures that Facebook is making almost ten dollars per person. Moreover, the majority of the money that they make is made in America, even though Americans make up only a small part of the total Facebook users. This means that Facebook-style advertising just isn't as profitable (for Facebook) outside the US as it is inside the US.

      For the financially minded, other things in the report might be more interesting: (a) Facebook has billions and billions (more than ten billions) of dollars in cash lying around, and (b) more billions in credit should they need it, although they haven't so far needed it, because they have more cash than god on hand. They could be issuing a billion dollars worth of stock, which will dilute their current stock's value.

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:44AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:44AM (#74859) Journal

        Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for making sense of deliberate Wall St. obfuscation! So non-USain ordinary joes are being subsidized by normal US Joes? And they call this a business plan these days?

        • (Score: 2) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:30AM

          by Paradise Pete (1806) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:30AM (#74865)

          It's a report, not a business plan. It has tables with labeled rows of numbers. They even sum them for you at the bottom. Not exactly obfuscated.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:32PM (#75123)

          Yes, it is important to enable non-Americans to share and participate in social media, even if that means subsidizing foreign nationals. It's the brightest intel scheme we've ever devised, and our citizens seems willing to pay for it via advertising.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday July 29 2014, @09:32PM

            by cafebabe (894) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @09:32PM (#75271) Journal

            Jay Miner [wikipedia.org]'s opinion from 1989 or 1990 [amigaforever.com] was that a program of basic computer proficiency was ideal to minimize the cost and maximize the effectiveness of a state spying on its citizens. This would have been considered a minority opinion at the time but I believe that it would more widely accepted nowadays.

            Would we have all of these social media sites and analytic systems if people could not type their stream-of-consciousness thoughts into a little text box?

            --
            1702845791×2
      • (Score: 2) by Tramii on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:42PM

        by Tramii (920) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:42PM (#75128)

        Thank you! Would give you karma if I had any mod points.

        Can we update/replace the original article with this excellent summary?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by nightsky30 on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:03AM

    by nightsky30 (1818) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:03AM (#74832)

    Zuck Fuckerberg!!!

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:09AM

    by tftp (806) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:09AM (#74844) Homepage

    The good news is that Mark Zuckerberg is worthless to me. Beat that, Mark!

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by redneckmother on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:34AM

    by redneckmother (3597) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:34AM (#74851)

    "the land of the free"
        should read
    "the land of the freetards"

    Just sayin'.

    --
    Mas cerveza por favor.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:55PM (#75011)

      You come off like an adolescent douche.

      Just sayin'.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:05PM (#75022)

      http://www.seobook.com/freetards [seobook.com]

      It also reminds me of something I read online (at the green site?).

      Someone said essentially: "I paid for my internet connection, I'm
      not paying anything for anything else I find available online."

      With a mindset like that embracing more and more people online
      the only way sites can stay online is to ask you for donations
      or to buy their products/services

      *OR*

      'pay' by viewing (blockable) advertising.

      Enjoy the 'free' internet while you still can before it all
      goes behind some sort of paywall making ad-supported search
      giant Google almost worthless....

      TL;DR: http://www.seobook.com/images/freetard/freetards.gif [seobook.com]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:24AM

    by Paradise Pete (1806) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:24AM (#74862)

    with $US1.26bn of the $2.91bn brought in during the 30 days to June 30th coming from the land of the free.

    That's for the quarter, not 30 days. Facebook doesn't bring in that much revenue.

  • (Score: 2) by hybristic on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:38AM

    by hybristic (10) on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:38AM (#74874) Journal

    The word factoid doesn't actually mean an interesting fact. While that's how it's interpreted in common usage, it actually means an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:00AM (#74885)

      I thought a factoid is what you get when you spin a fact around its axis.