In Meanwhile, Back at the Plantation Nick Carr raises questions about the importance of who owns what in a social network. He looks at the recent sale of Bebo – the world’s third largest social network after Facebook and Myspace – to Time Warner. Carr notes that the founders in that case did not claim ownership of their participants content:

Birch, to his credit, did not claim ownership rights to the music and other creative work uploaded to his site. But neither did he offer any royalties or other financial benefits to the musicians whose work, as Bragg writes, played such an important role in “draw[ing] members and advertising — to his business.”

Although it is easy to react to these big social media sales as an act of digital exploitation, where a handful of key players reap the rewards of millions of individual contributors, it is also important to note the many nuanced aspects of these deals. The big players have created for many a sort of “digital playground” and that has a value both for the content producers and the content consumers. Many businesses reap advantages as well, as when a band uses social media rather than advertising to spread the word. No network would dare to claim any ownership from song royalties even if it was that network that launched the career.

Perhaps most important, however, is the fact that even if you could find a formula for distributing network advertising proceeds according to content production the checks to the content folks would be in most cases so tiny as to be almost insignificant.

For example in 2007 Facebook’s revenues were about $150 million. Thus Facebook’s 100 million participants generate, on average, less than $1.50 in revenue *per year*.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg says he expects to double that to 300 million in 2008, but most think that estimate is unrealistic and even if true the average per user would be well under $3 per year given the increase in subscribers we can expect over that time.

So, as one of the information slaves at Facebook I am contributing to the site in a way that allows them to make $1.50 per year monetizing my participation, and maybe just under a penny per day next year if all goes very well for them.

I certainly get more value than that from Facebook, and thus it appears I have only a weak claim to ask for them to cut me a monthly check for the $0.12 in advertising revenues I helped to generate. Mark Z – I guess it will be OK if you send me that … quarterly.