How Bad Is Facebook Addiction? Non Productive Facebook Time Is Worth $3 Trillions While The Company Estimates 5 Billion Users By 2030
When Mark Zuckerberg coded the early blueprints of Facebook from the dorms of Harvard, he could surely not have predicted the dramatic rise of his site; the site which used to decide whether a girl was hot or not; Facebook now has 1.6 billion monthly active users, which is larger than the population of China, the most populous country in the world.
Such is the impact of Facebook that many users report instinctively visiting Facebook first thing in the internet. It’s certainly great platform to be updated with friends and family and to find about interesting stuffs on internet but with internet running rampant on human lives, it’s abuse was inevitable. A huge portion of Facebook users are addicted on this social portal which may have negative effect on their productivity. According to NBC News, Facebook users are letting $3.5 trillion worth of productivity go astray by spending their time on the social networking giant.
According to Facebook’s 2012 IPO filings, Facebook’s users spend an aggregate of 10.5 billion minutes per day on the platform. That is completely excluding the mobile platforms, and the numbers are only going up.
The calculation made by NBC news estimates that total Facebook users since 2009 have spent a collective 55 million years on Facebook.
NBC News came up to the figures by elaborate calculations. They devoted the minimal 20 minutes of Facebook times, usually squandered by hopelessly reloading the news feed;the average user could earn $880 which results in a cumulative total of $900 billion.
Since the registration of 100 million users on Facebook in 2008, if a calculation is to be done then the money that could have been made amounts to $3.5 trillion. The calculation, however, is purely hypothetical. These Facebook users would probably be engaged in similar nonproductive things if not for Facebook, but the staggering statistics just sticks in the eye.
The calculation above is a bit flawed since it is ignoring the money earned by Facebook while the users redundantly watch cute kitten photos or vacation albums of their colleague on their walls. The ads targeted to the users make up for 12 percent of the total Facebook income.
Facebook, on the other hand does not seem to mind the accusations. The number of Facebook users is increasing like viruses on infected hosts. In the celebration event marking the 12th anniversary of Facebook, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg was confident that their company will engage five billion people by 2030.
This would mean 60 percent of humanity would be browsing through blue walls of Facebook, as the population is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030.
After the event, Zuckerberg said:
“We want to finish connecting everyone, we’re going to do it in partnership with governments and different companies all over the world”
The Facebook mega project Internet.org which is dedicated to provide free internet to citizens of the nations is the backbone for the high ambitions of Zuckerberg. This project has been hit with few early blows; recently it was banned in India and closed in Egypt, but these setbacks have not derailed the intentions of the company.
Facebook is celebrating its birthday today and has declared this day as “Friends Day,” and on being asked the reason for such label, Facebook replied it was to “reflect on the importance of connecting”.
It seems sky is the limit for Facebook as the stature of company is growing like a bamboo shoot. Recently Zuckerberg overtook Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the forth-richest person in the world.
When Facebook is celebrating it’s 12th birthday by sending friendship stories, the older social networking sites like twitter and Myspace are having their dig at Facebook.
#BeforeFacebookI had to stalk my exes with binoculars and camouflage gear. pic.twitter.com/kpGaZUrEiN
— Ally Hirschlag (@AllyHirschlag) February 3, 2016
While it’s certainly not factual to say Facebook is draining the productivity of people, if Zuckerberg achieves his ambitions, the user may get a bigger number of likes, but one can only hope it’s not in the expense of his valuable dollars.
[image via pixbay]
