Earlier this week, Facebook reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2015. Once again, revenue is up, income is up, daily and monthly active users are up and there are now well over 1.5 billion people using the service. In other words, business is booming for the most popular social network on the planet.
But that’s not what we’re here to discuss.
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Combing through the earnings slides from Facebook’s presentation, The Guardian stumbled upon one especially fascinating data point — “Average Revenue per User.” It might not sound very exciting, but what it shows is exactly how much an individual from a given region is worth to Facebook.
For example, U.S. and Canadian users are worth $13.54 a head, by far the largest amount of any users on Facebook. Europeans, on the other hand, bring in just $4.50 each. That’s slightly less than a third of the average American or Canadian user.
The gulf grows even wider further down the line, as users in the Asia-Pacific region registered an average of just $1.59 in the fourth quarter while the “rest of the world” came in at $1.22 per user.
When you consider all of the billions of dollars Facebook generated in 2015, even being worth more than $10 doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. We’re all just pawns in Facebook’s plan to dominate the Internet anyway.
