But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be used without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify. Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is filled with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to users and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-perview) or when the ad is clicked (pay-per-click). The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall, and other users’ profiles and walls. For specific time periods parts of his/ her screen are filled with advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms targeted to his/her interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is highly targeted to user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activity is necessary for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing possibilities and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based on user activities that are the labour that create the social media prosumer commodity.
Facebook clients run ads based on specific targeting criteria, e.g. 25–35-year-old men in the USA who are interested in literature and reading. What exactly is the commodity in this example? It is the ad space that is created on a specific 25–35-year-old man’s screen interested in e.g. Shakespeare while he browses Facebook book pages or other pages. The ad is potentially presented to all Facebook users who fall into this category, which amounted to 27,172,420 on 3 June 2013. What is the value of the single ad presented to a user? It is the average labour=usage time needed for the production of the ad presentation. Let’s assume these 27,172,420 million users are on average 60 minutes per day on Facebook and in these 60 minutes 60 ads are presented to them on average. All the time they spend online is used for generating targeted ads. It is labour time that generates targeted ad presentations. We can therefore say that the value of a single ad presented to a user in this example is one minute of labour/usage/ prosumption time.
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4 Facebook Inc., SEC Filings, Form 10-K 2012, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680113 000003/fb-12312012x10k.htm
5 Data source: http://www.alexa.com
6 According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, the latest available world population count was 2 405 518 376 on June 3rd, 2013.