Facebook 'contributes' €15.3bn to EU economy... bitch

The UK economy might be down in the dumps, but there is a ray of sunshine from an unlikely source: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has supposedly helped to contribute £2.2bn to the country's GDP in 2011. Facebook added that – with a lot of help from the rise of mobile applications – it has "supported" 232,000 jobs in recent years …

[Captain Underpants]

Bias? We've heard of it

Yeah, I'll believe how much Facebook is totally contributing to economic growth when we get figures from someone who's not being paid by Facebook.

I can sort of see how FB, Twitter ect can be integrated into a company's existing customer interaction processes, but on the other hand I've seen various companies who seem to think a Facebook page is an adequate substitute for a dedicated webpage, and most of the time the quality of information available (or usually not available) tells me everything I need to know to decide that they're not getting my business....

[Anonymous Coward]

God is in his heaven

>It further claimed, courtesy of numbers crunched by a Deloitte research team on behalf of the the social network, that Zuck's outfit had contributed €15.3bn, or £12.7bn, to the EU's economy.

And half that amount was Deloitte's fee for massaging the figures to show the required result.

[BristolBachelor]

Missing figures

I didn't go to the report, but looking at the table in the article, it is missing the column for money sucked out of the UK/Europe. For example it's all very well saying about ad "credits", but I'm sure you only get the credits when you spend your own money too, which is then sucked out of the UK to the Caymen islands or somewhere.

Plus there is all the time lost by people at work looking at their FB pages every 10 minutes (In my defence I put in more than 10x extra free time at work than I spend on El Reg et al.)

[Peter2]

Wealth; You can grow it, dig it up, or refine it into a more valuable product. Anything else is just moving it around.

Therefore, since web advertising does not fall into one of those three categories one has to suspect that they aren't actually creating any money for the EU economy, just receiving it for advertising.

[Anonymous Coward]

But how much was wasted on Facebook?

A damnsight more than that....

[Big_Ted]

Whats missing

Whats missing from those figures is the cost to the economy for all the wasted time with people using facebook and twitter whist at work and not doing their jobs.

Plus I fail to see haw pressing the like button is making money for the UK......

I bet it costs more than it makes for most companies....

[jonathanb]

If for example, the business is a small music band that isn't mainstream: If you "like" them, they post details of their gigs on their wall, and their fans get details of them and are more likely to attend.

[ItsNotMe]

@jonathanb

That is a stretch.

[Richard Cartledge]

Entertainment is a wealth consumer, not a wealth creator.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollox !

How many hours are lost in productivity with people arseing about with Facebook when they should be doing their actual job ?

99.9% of them are babbling on about their social life or exchanging pictures of cats.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted at 10:56. What time do you start work? El Reg. Where people babble about Apple. Or Opera. Or Emacs. I'd rather see cute pictures of kittens to be honest.

[Drew V.]

So...how about some taxes?

To any European government that isn't getting any taxes from FB, the company is essentially a giant blue leech just sucking away at that country, just like every other internet company based outside of its borders.

[GotThumbs]

Sounds Good for EU, But...

If this is true, then great for the EU workers.

I still don't have a FB account....and will never have a FB account. I just don't have any interest in it, but I didn't even bother with the first social network....AOL Community/Neighborhoods or whatever it was called.

FB is just a marketing pool.

[Neily-boy]

in other news......

Paternity claim shocker as Mark Zuckerberg says his father is Bruce Lee.

[Old Hand]

Units?

Can anyone see what the units are for the Value Added column in the article? I am sure it is greater that 26k Euros

[Sirius Lee]

I'll agree with BristolBatchelor. I DID look at the report and it seems the usual flakey stuff - probably one of their consultant who studied English fiction at Uni. Take the panel "Facebook impact on advertising". You might think this would document how advertiser spend has changed with the advent of Facebook and show that spending on Facebook advertising is *in addition* to existing spend. No, it doesn't. I lists Ad companies using Facebook on behalf of clients. No comment about the distribution of cash spent on ads.

It's hard to see how advertising using Facebook can be anything but a zero sum game in an economy that's flat year on year. If Facebook *is* taking ad revenues that's great for Facebook. However, someone else must be losing income so it falls short of being a benefit to the economy.