If you are one of the 900 million people who use Facebook monthly, or even if you are one of the more than 500 million who use it EVERY DAY, you’re worth $1.25 to the company—or anyway that’s the average revenue the Zuckerberg juggernaut generates per user every quarter. So the price on your head is five bucks a year, which seems a pittance. But that’s still a lot of money, when you multiply it by a significant cross-section of the entire planet’s population.
Facebook mostly pumps your fiver (and the rest) right back into itself, R&D and Marketing eating up a lot of it and then there’s the lazy man’s (smart man’s?) R&D: acquisition. Photo-sharing Instagram is the darling of the moment, having won Facebook’s heart and a billion-dollar engagement ring. There’s even a pre-nup: if something happens (federal regulators?) to quash the deal, Instagram gets to keep a couple of hundred million anyway for the good times and romance. FB knows that sharing is caring: People on Facebook upload more than 200 million photos a day. A day.