How Facebook plans to take over the world ...
For the first few songs there’s only a small group of hardcore vocal fans at the front of the stage, flanked by a subdued mix of backpack-wearing dad types politely bobbing their heads, drinking cocktails out of plastic cups.
The shindig has been put on by Facebook for the benefit of delegates attending its F8 conference. The event, which has run most years since 2007, began as a means to win over the developer community and has now become a comprehensive and highly engineered launchpad for the company’s annual plans. Many of the 2,600 attendees have paid $595 to find out how they can integrate their own digital products with Facebook to carve out some kind of presence among its enormous audience – and there’s booze and entertainment thrown in.
The band is performing on the same stage from where Mark Zuckerberg has delivered the conference’s opening keynote speech. The lead singer makes a joke comparing the 31-year-old CEO to Star Wars villain Kylo Ren, and it seems to break the ice. From that point on the cheers and claps get louder and it starts to change into a more recognisable gig – but there is nothing as rapturous as when, hours earlier, “Zuck” had pledged a free virtual reality headset and Samsung smartphone to every attendee.
For this audience, it’s clear who the real rockstar is .
When Zuckerberg addresses the F8 audience it is with the composure and conviction of a president addressing his citizens. “We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it,” he says as he hammers home his “mission” to connect the world.
He warns of “people and nations turning inwards – against this idea of a connected world and community”, a position that fits both with his ideology and that of Facebook. This is not a speech about technical tweaks, but a state of the union address .
It takes courage to choose hope over fear,” he adds. Behind the rhetoric and the casual clothes, the message is clear: Facebook is one of the big boys now, taking on huge global challenges and planning for prosperity.
The scale of Facebook’s audience is unprecedented. More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook at least once a month, or half of all internet users. That’s before you count users on other Facebook-owned sites including WhatsApp, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and photo-sharing site Instagram, which has 400 million .
Facebook has also introduced its free basics service to 37 countries, offering a free but limited package of apps to mobile phone users, but which some critics say allows Facebook to tightly control the online experience of potentially the next billion people to come online.
“You hear all the platitudes about Facebook connecting the planet, but to say they are doing it for benevolent reasons is absolute nonsense. It’s about connecting commerce, not people,” says venture capitalist and former journalist Om Malik, who reminds us of the hidden agenda of social networking firms: if you’re not paying, you’re the product.
Facebook – which made $5.8bn of revenue in the last three months of 2015 – is able to make money from its users not just because of that unprecedented audience, but the amount of time they spend on the service. In the US the average 18- to 34-year-old spends 30 hours per month on social networking services, and 26 of those are on Facebook, according to analysts at ComScore.
Every click, every like, every comment and every connection is used to build up a rich profile of each user. Brands can then pay Facebook to target users based on their age, location, relationship status and interests. This is how Facebook makes its money – profiles of us that advertisers adore.
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