I'm not sure what you're saying anymore; I thought you were advocating that they charge per user to make the accounting more simple, instead of a more variable advertising model. Now I think you're advocating best accounting practices? I'm sure they have great internal accounting.
[tried to move to parent, but I lost the ability to edit before I could go back and add the whitespace... so I'm putting it back here so it is easier to read... sorry, I have no idea what I'm doing!!]
Ah, I think you're assuming that I'm saying they should go to a completely paid-for-in-cash-by-users model... which I'm not!
I'm just saying that if they flipped the model, and covered the operations costs directly from users, that the books would make more sense. This would make the accounting significantly more complex, so I wasn't making an argument for simplicity, rather as much detail and accuracy as possible! This information can be later analyzed and acted upon in simple ways.
This doesn't mean that there can't be a free to use service on top of a model like this. It just means that advertisers are literally paying on behalf of users for hosting, distribution and other operating costs.
This would mean that there wouldn't be advertisements on the read-side, in the "stream", rather on the write-side, when publishing... like with sponsored posts... Like, I personally choose to make my post sponsored by the Buffalo Bills because I love giving my money to the Buffalo Bills and the NFL (which I really do).
Or maybe some low-rent ads make you watch a 20 second video before paying for you to upload 200 photos from your phone, but at least you don't have to associate yourself with them.
We're smart enough to create the kinds of incentive structures that have made intellectual property function in a market economy for hundreds of years, we just need to revisit some deep fundamentals about how we buy and sell information.
It'll work out better for everyone. Facebook could take a percentage of the business for having created the market that introduced the advertisers to the authors. The authors are now free to do business as they please, directly covering their own costs or choosing to have them subsidized. The advertisers can establish better relationships with the authors, essentially treating them like business partners.
