Anybody who has ever worked in media sales knows what I am talking about. There has always been great exaggeration in readership, audience figures, from the very early days of the media to this day. Newspapers that claim to have 100,000 readers, might be read by as little as 5,000, TV programs that reach ~millions~ actually reach thousands, etc.
On the internet, exaggeration is the norm from day one, at a great order of magnitude.
Youtube videos become overnight sensations, because robots are programmed, in a fashion not to be detected, to click on videos millions of times. Sites claim millions of visits, but again, most of these have been hits by Russian robots attempting to SPAM comments, or worse yet, search engine robots that are indexing the site.
People like to be told lies and exaggerations. It makes them feel popular, grandiose, part of a big thing.
Thus the billion dollar Facebook user figure hides this fact – it is probably wildly exaggerated.
A lot of these are fake profiles. It does not take much for one to get hundreds of fake emails, to be able to open facebook accounts. There are fake celebrity accounts, people who impersonate others etc. Plus the light porno profiles, of which I get dozens of suggestions from Facebook to subscribe on a daily basis.
These are supposedly used by people who are in countries where pornography is prohibited, such as Pakistan and China. They use FB as a channel to view and exchange smut. That is, until these countries eventually prohibit FB too!
Company profiles, multiple profiles from the same user, celebrities (even dead) profiles abound.
Thus, out of the billion users, perhaps 200 million are really existing breathing persons. Additionally, about 500 people who were at once one of my friends, but disconnected from FB, appeared again on my list of friends, as the phoenix rose from the ashes. This leads me to think that FB accounts these as existing…
As FB is nothing more than a marketing platform, the billion dollar figure is tasty for avid advertisers willing to dish out millions to reach this “audience”. Only the audience is not that large.
The choice is yours – trust the lie, or the possible reality.
Bork Su 