Your stake in Facebook could be $135 978 once-off and $3 818 per year

OK, so by now everyone knows Steemit will soon surpass Facebook as the number on social media network. But before that happens, lets take a look at how much Facebook should have paid you so far, and should be paying you right now. My understanding of the Steemit model is that users own a part of the market cap and are paid out of the company's earnings in proportion to their engagement and Steem investment. 

So I applied that model to Facebook and ran some numbers. If you are a monthly user, in other words you use Facebook a couple of times per month, you have a stake in the company that is worth around $225.46. That is equivalent to about one-and-a-half shares (the share price now hovers at around $150) If you are a daily user, Facebook owes you closer to $339.95 once-off, which is the equivalent of more than two shares in the company. The income numbers were less impressive. But the conservative calculation results in $6.33 per year for the average monthly user, and $9.55 for the average daily user.

There is, however, a key factor here that in my opinion brings down the numbers considerably. If you are a Steemit user, the same level of engagement that you exercise on Steemit, if you were to engage that way on Facebook, would probably rank you in the top 20% of daily users in terms of sharing and posting content, likes, etc. Now, using the 80/20 principle, that means the top 20% of Facebook users are indirectly (or directly) responsible for 80% of the market cap or net income of the company. With this more realistic calculation, the numbers look pretty impressive at $1 359.78 and $38.18 per year in income. 

So, a rough calculation would be a solid justification of why Facebook don't really need to pay users anything because the numbers are so small (except maybe for the market cap one), but a realistic calculation results in some pretty significant amounts. Remember these are the averages so some people are probably owed 100 times this amount, at least! That is $135 978 once off (equal to almost 1000 shares) and $3 818 per year. Most people could retire right now with that kind of money!

The things I looked at are as follows:

FB current market cap: $436.49 billion

FB Net Income for 2013: $1.49 billion, monthly active users 1.155 billion, daily active users 699 million  

FB Net Income 2014: $2.93 billion, monthly active users 1.317 billion, daily active users 829 million

FB Net Income 2015: $3.67 billion, monthly active users 1.49 billion, daily active users 968 million

FB Net Income 2016: $10.19 billion, monthly active users 1.712 billion, daily active users 1.128 billion

FB Net Income for 1st quarter of 2017: $3.064 billion, monthly active users 1.936 billion, daily active users 1.284 billion

MY SOURCES WERE:

https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb/financials

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau

E-mail me at pjcillie at transkaroocommunications dot com to see all the calculations in Excel.