Interesting insight, as usual, from Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note.

This year, Facebook will make about $1.5bn in advertising revenue. On average, this is about three dollars per registered user, a figure that is significantly higher for the 50% of the social network’s population that logs in at least once a day. How does Facebook achieve such numbers? Last week, we looked at the architecture Facebook is building as a kind of internet overlay. Now, let’s take a closer look at the money side.

If Google is a one-cent-at-a-time advertising machine, Facebook is a one-user-at-a-time engine. The social network is putting the highest possible value on two things: a) user data, b) the social graph, e.g. the connections between users.

For a European or American media, one user in, say, Turkey (23m Facebook users) carries little or no value as far as advertising is concerned. To Facebook, this person’s connections will be the key metric of his/her value. Especially if she is connected to others living outside Turkey. According to Justin Smith from the research firm Inside Facebook, in any given new market, the social network’s membership really takes off once the number of connections to the outside world exceeds domestic-only connections. A Turkish person whose contacts are solely located within the country is less valuable than an educated individual chatting with people abroad; the latter is expected to travel, has a significant purchasing power and carries a serious consumer influence over her network. As a result, Facebook extracts much more value from a remote consumer than any other type of media does.