Will Facebook Users Demand to Be Shown the Money?

You've probably followed this week's Facebook about-face, in which the burgeoning social net first changed its terms of service to let it be known that it could do whatever it wanted, in perpetuity, with user content -- and then, in a replay of Facebook controversies gone by, reconsidered. But one angle you may not have considered is whether Facebook, in conceding "that people own their information and control who they share it with ... " per founder Mark Zuckerberg, should pay users a cut of the revenue the service makes off of their content. In other words, if I post some content, and a lot of people visit it, which results in a lot of people being exposed to ads on Facebook, isn't my content contribution something I should be compensated for? It's an interesting angle, posited by Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer of Cymfony, on the company's blog:

I think the real message here is that online will not obey even the most basic principles of the offline media model. Traditional media relied on the implicit deal that the reader gets free content, but in exchange they have to be exposed to ads. Even this basic assumption of the media model doesn't seem to translate online.

Consumers have total ownership of what they create despite the fact that they do not pay for the service to upload, store, and display it online. Facebook can't rely on an implicit quid-pro-quo to provide this raft of services in exchange for the right to use some of that content in ways that help them pay for all those servers, bandwidth, etc.

Of course, even though we thought we were empowered back then, we weren't. During the days of the "old" Internet about the only content Joe User could create, and post, was email. Now, because we have become content creators, off of which services like Facebook are trying to make money, we are owed in a different way, because we've become publishers; we now add something to the online media mix other than sheer attention. The balance of power between online media company, consumer and advertiser has changed.

Of course, you could call this discussion moot, since it's unclear how Facebook and other social nets will make the money they may "owe" users anyway. But at some point, consumers (maybe the word "consumer" is a misnomer here) might make the leap Jim's making here. They certainly, after being tipped off by Consumerist this week, showed how much they value their content. If Facebook values that content, which it so clearly does, than a logical next step is compensation. Not that that makes a business model.