Online Companies Like Facebook Have Created a Meaningless Economy, says Douglas Rushkoff
Online businesses were originally measured by how much they sold. Makes sense, right? That's how economics is taught. But today, the largest online ...
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In the original .com era companies were measured by how much money they made. The idea was that you sold a lot of stuff and took in a lot of cash and that was the way you could get a valuation and then get acquired or do an IPO. Now, consumers don't have money anymore. People are poor. So companies can't really use revenue as a way of showing what they're worth, plus they have no real business plans. So what they do instead is use likes as a metric of their worth. If a company can have a lot of people saying I'd like it, I like it, I like it, then that more ethereal abstract metric, I've got a million likes; I've got 20 million likes, that becomes marketable. So if I want to sell a record and make money and go to a record company or a CD company, I can show look, my song on Y...
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In the original .com era companies were measured by how much money they made. The idea was that you sold a lot of stuff and took in a lot of cash and that was the way you could get a valuation and then get acquired or do an IPO. Now, consumers don't have money anymore. People are poor. So companies can't really use revenue as a way of showing what they're worth, plus they have no real business plans. So what they do instead is use likes as a metric of their worth. If a company can have a lot of people saying I'd like it, I like it, I like it, then that more ethereal abstract metric, I've got a million likes; I've got 20 million likes, that becomes marketable. So if I want to sell a record and make money and go to a record company or a CD company, I can show look, my song on Y...
