Earlier this week Facebook released its earnings report for first quarter of 2014, revealing revenues of $2.5 billion, which beat estimates from Wall Street of $2.36 billion. It was also announced that the number of monthly active Facebook users on mobile now exceeds one billion, so it was no real surprise that the amount of the total revenue that comes from mobile advertising has also risen from 53% last quarter, to 59% in 2014 Q1.
Not bad for a social network that is free for anyone in the world to use.
However, there is obviously an inherent value in facilitating the sharing of personal information between friends, and between customers and businesses. Also contained within the Q1 earnings report was the news that Facebook’s average revenue per user (ARPU) around the world had increased over the past year as well.
Mashable have published the following chart, created by Statista, which breaks down the evolution of the average revenue per Facebook user over the past year:
So clearly the bean counters at Facebook are able to put a monetary value on your personal information, but can you?
There is a reason why you post things to Facebook (or any other social network for that matter). It may be to share something fun with friends, so start a debate, to ask a question, or just so that you can go back and find it later. Almost everything we do online is done so with the intention of evoking a reaction from our network of friends, family, colleagues or customers.
It’s easy to forget that when we post things online, we don’t actually own a copy of it ourselves that we know we can always lay our hands on.
It’s staggering to think how much care people put into keeping mundane physical records such as bank statements from years gone by, yet how little they put into looking after the more sentimental, digital stories they are telling. After all, if the likes of Facebook were the victim of a cyber-attack, who would you turn to for all the memories that you’ve been creating and reliving online?
SocialSafe is the social media backup tool that lets you download and keep your own copies of your digital memories from a variety of social networks. Even if nothing were to happen to the originals, it’s good to know that you’ve done what you can to make sure that your memories are preserved… You know, just in case.