from Paul Smalera:
Facebook.coop
Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.
Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.
I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.
Before I explain further, let me lay out the case in four simple points:
IPOverload: Facebook goes public
The least suspenseful waiting game in Silicon Valley is now over, thank heavens. Facebook, which began as a decidedly private Harvard hangout, has begun the process of going absolutely, totally, unabashedly public.
Facebook filed for an initial public offering with the SEC Wednesday, which means we have the first raw glimpse of its financials. Advertising makes up 85 percent of its $3.7 billion in annual revenue. And it took in $1 billion of income in 2011. For more of the best data points, see my colleague Anthony De Rosa’s rundown.
Facebook is synonymous with the Internet in many ways: It boasts more than 10 percent of the world’s population as active users and has realizable ambitions to be the preeminent vetting service on the Net, making a “Like” as powerful and capricious as Caesar’s opposable thumb.
Even if you aren’t a Facebook user (I am not anymore), its impact is inescapable. The world’s largest social network has, for better or worse, made TMI a laughably quaint notion, redefined friendship, and become, if not a verb (like Google), perhaps the most recognizable proper noun of the digital age.
All of which should mean, of course, that Facebook is the investment of a lifetime. And maybe it is — well, it certainly is for the insiders and early private investors who’ll be cashing in some of their chips, and for those lucky employees among the 3,000 who will be getting some new chips in the big game.
But for the rest of us, the story may not be quite the same. Popular brands often don’t quite line up with expectations. The dot-com bubble taught us that. Facebook’s IPO suggests that the backhanded Wall Street compliment, “priced for perfection,” was coined for this very company at this very time.
For what it’s worth, the largest co-operative in the world, The Co-operative Group, had £11.9 billion in revenue last year and has 6 million members.