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posted by takyon on Monday April 16 2018, @08:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the BUY-LOW! dept.

Why You Should Buy Facebook While It's In Crisis (archive)

In spite of the headlines, the hearings, and the hashtags, it does not look like many users are leaving Facebook. A survey conducted by Deutsche Bank concluded that "just 1% of respondents were deactivating or deleting their accounts." If the survey is representative of Facebook's 2 billion users, then 20 million users might leave. This may seem like a big loss, but it means 99% of users are staying.

Doug Clinton, the managing partner of Loup Ventures, estimates that each active user generates about $21 in profits for Facebook each year. The loss of 20 million users would therefore reduce Facebook's earnings by roughly $420 million. Facebook's pretax income last year was $20.5 billion. Does a 2% drop in pretax income justify a 9% loss of market value? I don't think so.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @10:36PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @10:36PM (#667832)

    Picture a door-to-door Facebook: Somebody rings the bell, and you sit down together and first look at copies of a bunch of personal stuff from people you may or may not know (copies that you get to keep,) then you make a page with your personal information, photographs, etc. That person then walks out the door with your personal stuff and with a wink and a nod implies a promise to not share it except with the people you want to share it with. It's all free, they make the copies for you.

    Nobody I knew in 1976 would have signed up for something like that (unless they were willfully foolish and/or desperate) - too good to be true, they must be screwing you somehow.

    I think this is a good point, but I think a major difference is that if a non-computer-assisted human is walking around doing that people understand much better what is actually going on. The fact that opening up the Signal app [wikipedia.org], selecting a friend to send message to, typing some text, and tapping the send button is a completely different interaction than doing the exact same thing but in the Facebook Messenger app instead is very difficult for non-technical users to grasp or even be aware of. Both seem like they should be similar to the physical world activity of putting a letter in an envelope and handing it off to the postal service, an activity where privacy is not only assumed but strongly guaranteed by law (at least in the US). And an activity that I gather people in 1976 engaged in regularly.

    The software marketed at normal users is aggressively designed to make it easy to give away private information while making it very unclear who that information will actually be accessible to.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:22AM

    by legont (4179) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:22AM (#667932)

    In fact at the office I have a required semiannual training dedicated to how to protect the reputation of the company while using social media. It boils down to "if you write anything without an explicit permission of our attorneys your will be fired".

    Why a private citizen shall behave differently? Is her reputation somehow less valuable to her?

    BTW, could anybody leak facebook's code of conduct? I mean what can facebook employees write on their facebook pages. This would be a perfect training material for any facebook user.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.