Despite the considerable effort those users have put into constructing
and maintaining their pages, a sexier competitor could still draw them
away by the millions—just as Facebook did to Myspace. So, when its
endless monetizing initiatives piss off users—as did Beacon—the
company quickly withdraws, waits, then probes somewhere else with
some other innovation. Jeff Bezos highlighted in one of his famous
investment letters that what kills mature companies is an unhealthy
adherence to process. Just ask United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, who
defended his employees who dragged a passenger off a plane, as they
had “followed established procedures for dealing with situations like
this.”^25
Much of this innovation comes gratis. Facebook benefits from the
ultimate jujitsu move: it will likely become the largest media company
on earth, and it gets its content, similar to Google, from its users. In
other words, more than a billion customers labor for Facebook without
compensation. By comparison, the big entertainment companies must
spend billions to create original content. Netflix is shelling out more
than $100 million for each season of The Crown and will spend $6
billion on content in 2017 (50 percent more than either NBC or
CBS).^26 Yet Facebook competes for our attention, and wins it, with
pictures of fourteen-month-old Max curled up with his new Vizsla
puppy. This is fascinating to a small audience, maybe two hundred or
three hundred friends, but that’s enough. It’s easy for the machine to
aggregate, segment, and target. So, to extend the analogy, what would
CBS, ESPN, Viacom (MTV), Disney (ABC), Comcast (NBC), Time
Warner (HBO), and Netflix (combined) be worth if they had no
content costs? Simple—they’d be worth what Facebook is worth.