People Waste Too Much Time On Facebook, Losing Trillions Of Dollars

If Facebook users would have spent their time on earning a minimum wage instead of using the social network, they would have earned trillions of dollars.

Facebook has led to a loss of trillions of dollars. 12 years ago, Thursday, a Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg laid the foundations of Facebook with his simple dream: to make everyone spend maximum amount of time clicking around his website. Today, the users of the social network are closing in on $3.5 trillion in terms of lost productivity.

The networking giant has around $1.6 billion monthly active users over the population of every country on the planet. Last week, quarterly results reported that these users are quite valuable for the organization as it earns revenue of $3.73 from each user across the globe (and more than that for Americans).

Facebook has filed in IPO held in 2012 that, in terms of market capitalization, every user worth is over $200 in valuation. Its users cumulatively give 10.5 billion minutes each day to the network (excluding mobile), and participation depending on those users who visit the website on a monthly basis is much more than that.

If one assumes that the same amount of time is spent by users today, then it means that people living across the globe have utilized an aggregate 55 million years on the platform since the start of 2009.

20 minutes per day is a huge amount of time – well over a year during the course of the average life span. If users use that time to work for a minimum wage instead of poking and liking each other, each of them would earn around $880 per year. That is almost $900 billion in terms of total hypothetical labor in 2015.

At the end of 2008, Facebook succeeded in hitting 100 million users and the aforementioned calculations reveal that it has occupied sufficient time for inhibiting over $3 trillion in terms of hypothetical labor since that time.

Facebook is rejoicing its birthday as Friends Day. To be fair, it is quite likely that most of the users would do anything else equally unproductive if they were not on Facebook, but the calculations shows the potential worth of all that participation. If each user replaced his/her 20 minutes with a work on minimum wage, all of them would cumulatively purchase the entire enterprise of Zuckerberg each year.

Since 2009, their aggregate income would surpass United Kingdom’s GDP. This might seem like an idiotic way to think regarding a social network organization, but seems appealing as advertisers pay money for exposure in each minute of every hour wasted.