Reply to post: Re: Well there's the problem

Re: Well there's the problem

"At 1.5x the cost which is the rough ballpark used to account for tax, pensions, office space, equipment etc that'd cost 22.5k p/a per employee so for 40 million you'd get ~1,777 people doing the job for around 0.1% of the companies yearly profit so it's not really even a case of the business model not being profitable."

Sure, but if you're going to look at the entire company's global profit, you also have to think about the cost of doing the moderation globally. Maybe you could handle the work in the UK with 2000-odd people. Then you need another 2000 or so for each other country in Europe, and for each similarly-sized one around the world. Probably 10 times that for a bigger country like the US. That means it's easily 1% of profits just moderating a single country, and probably at least 20-30% in total. And that's assuming minimum wage is enough to cut it, when they're (certainly Facebook at least, I think Google as well) already having issues with lawsuits and claims for psychological treatment even with the minimal amount of people involved. Could they do it and still be profitable? Maybe, I don't think we have anywhere near enough information here to do a real calculation. But it would certainly be a significant hit to profits even if it's not enough to kill things off entirely.

It's also worth noting that the Google/Alphabet thing isn't really worth worrying about. Google accounts for 99.4% of Alphabet's revenue. Alphabet isn't a real company, it's just a shell to collect Google's stuff together under a different name and funnel some of the money to speculative projects (like self-driving cars). Any distinction between the two names is completely meaningless; it's all either just Google, or Google wearing a false nose.