If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few truly giant companies.
I was surprised by this definition too.
But w.r.t. the amounts of money, they spent $57MM over 15 years, so it's $4MM/y using very rough math.
Upd: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Standards... says on p. 29 that it's less than $27.5MM or 1000 people, so you are right, it's quite a high bar.
Upd2: EU caps small businesses at 50 people and medium at 250, which sounds much more reasonable to me https://www.ucl.ac.uk/procurement/suppliers/smes#:~:text=Def....
It would be like looking at how much a small business fabricator spent on metal and other supplies. That number is going to be larger than what they actually bring in as profit. If ads aren't your supplies then it would absolutely be an indication of being a large business if you spent $57 million on marketing.
But I'm sure they wouldn't have spent $57M if they hadn't extracted more than that from other advertising parties.
I also don't see how shared.com is any different than buzzfeed.com. Is the deciding factor the number of things listed in an article? Like whether the list is of 8 things or of 38 things? What's the difference between those two sites?
My thoughts exactly. Not necessarily agreeing with FB's act here, but this post and the way they connect their issue to a hot topic these days (small businesses) seems hypocritical and an attempt to make people sympathize with them. That's not what's happening here. They should instead talk about the entirety of their business (all their pages, not just a handful) and then claim it is a small business.
There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory
Penn State has its own data-centers, is part of the Internet2 consortium and has dedicated fiber to both AWS and Azure but you're still ultimately reliant on those you're leasing the connections from - even if you own the fiber, you're probably leasing the right-of-way/poles/etc.
So ... how do we build an Internet that's fully inter-connected but can withstand actions by the few relatively large carriers? Thinking about it a bit more, isn't the effect of having a few large network providers analogous to the issue with BitCoin having a few large mining operations in effective control of the ecosystem?
EDIT: This was posted on today's "Who is hiring?" thread - not really p2p Internet but ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633106
Problem is, people expect streaming video on their smartphones. You can't do that over low bandwidth over the horizon links.
Continent scale? Depends on the continent. No way to do that in the Americas, there's just too much open space. You could do it in many cities I do think.
If you're in the position to lease a connection to an internet exchange, you've got tons of options for transit from there. And leasing fiber is generally a matter of location and cost, not content; I don't know if it's strictly common carrier, but it might be.
Going multi-platform from the start is probably not the way to go as you are adding complication before you have the basics rounded out, but once you are spending that much on advertising you presumably have a sizable turn-over and should have long ago looked at diversifying to deal with situations like this which (even if temporary) could kill the business model.
Of course if FB is truly the only game in town for your target audience, you have a problem there...
It led to some quirkiness: we had to disavow ourselves of almost all cloud services. They wanted all the software and data on-prem because they didn't want anything on U.S. soil.
There are a couple authoritarian states that have fully-owned state enterprises that people might also argue are one-in-the-same.