Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abe Lincoln

Google to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
CNN

What would YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and any other user generated content based web services be without their users - the ones who produce and consume all that content? At the same time users are exposing their gestures to a growing audience of marketers, while inevitably investing their most valuable resource, attention, to an ever increasing number of ads.

And what gets bought when Google acquires Youtube? When Yahoo buys Del.icio.us? When Murdoch buys MySpace? It’s not the technology. It’s the users (along with their connections, their gestures and their attention) + their content, the fruit of their daily work.

Greg got it right back when Yahoo bought Del.icio.us:

Assume 300,000 people make use of del.icio.us in a meaningful, regular way (a wild-ass guess, but for the sake of argument) and assume the purchase price is around $30 million. That means my personal bookmarks just got sold for a hundred bucks.

A few months ago Jason Calacanis came up with an interesting idea:

I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your “social bookmarking” rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we’ll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that–a baseline).

A few weeks ago Stan and I had an interesting discussion that was based on both the ideas expressed in the blog posts above and the user’s revolt on Facebook, whose unwillingness to accept a new Facebook feature led to the formation of a movement that forced Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg to beg for forgiveness. We came to the following conclusions:

Users are unpaid, content generating workers, who not only do the work that eventually results in enourmous company valuations and buy outs, but also are constantly exposed to a whole meta-attention industry that aims to monetize their gestures and their attention. At the same time, the Facebook example shows how much power the users have if they organize themselves in groups of common interest.
However, they currently do not harness the power they could have over the services that they use and work for.The workers of the 19th century eventually organized themselves in unions to ensure fair payments, working conditions and the possibility to influence corporate decisions.
Now the way how most UGC-based social services work allows users to form such groups and unions in a much more efficient manner than it was possible for the workers.

“The Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Karl Marx

That’s why Stan, Greg and I started three related projects, all under the umbrella of the idea that it’s time for users to organize in unions.
Stan has created the MySpace Union Group:

Greg steps forward with his (not yet public, but very interesting) Union of Users.

And I am happy to announce the world’s first user union, which is a group in Germany’s Facebook clone StudiVZ (you need a StudiVZ account to visit this page - the official blog is coming soon):

All of this is work in progress and I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: Andreas (german blogger acquaintance) got the scoop.

: studivz, facebook, users, usersunion, unionofusers, marx, youtube

Thanks for visiting my blog! If you like it, subscribe to my RSS feed or share this post via one of the social media services below.