The Next Facebook Won't Look Like Facebook
- Joseph Haecker
- Jun 5
- 4 min read
The biggest social media companies don't sell content. They sell access to the digital real estate their users create.
I've said for years that
100% of us were trained to be employees.
From the first time you moved in your mother's womb and received praise. To your first words. Your first steps. Your grades in school. Your participation in sports. Your performance reviews. Your promotions. Nearly every system around us is designed to reward us for performing inside someone else's framework.
Then there are the self-employed.
Most people think self-employment is entrepreneurship. I don't.
The self-employed are still fundamentally trading time, expertise, products, or services for money. They may have more freedom, but they're still often at the center of the machine. If they stop working, the income often stops too.
Then there are business owners.
Years ago, Shaquille O'Neal famously said that he was rich, but the people who owned the teams he played for were wealthy. That realization changed his thinking. Today, Shaq is known as much for buying, investing in, and owning businesses as he is for basketball. Business owners think differently. They aren't worried about whether Sarah called in sick today. They're focused on the asset itself and whether it produces value.
Then comes an even smaller group: franchise founders.
These are people who figured out a repeatable business model and made it available to others. What's fascinating is that they didn't have to. They could have continued scaling alone. Instead, they created systems, processes, and infrastructure that allowed other entrepreneurs to participate. Today, franchising represents more than 845,000 establishments, supports nearly 8.9 million jobs, and contributes more than $558 billion to U.S. GDP. That's the power of a replicable business model.
But there is an even smaller group.
Social platform owners
You can count most of them on your fingers.
Facebook. LinkedIn. Reddit. X. Snapchat. Medium.
What makes them different is that they don't create the majority of the content that powers their businesses.
Their users do.
In fact, there are now more than 5.6 billion social media users worldwide, and these platforms derive nearly all of their value from the participation of their communities. If users stopped posting, commenting, sharing, and contributing, the platforms would have very little to offer.
Ironically, marketers rarely describe social media as what it actually is:
A user-generated content business model.
The platform simply provides the digital real estate.
The users create the value.
That's why social media has become one of the most efficient business models ever created. The platform owner doesn't need to produce every piece of content. The community does it for them.
Which leads to an interesting question:
If social media is such a powerful model, why aren't there more social platforms?
The answer is simple...
Most people believe building a social platform is too expensive, too technical, too risky, and too difficult to compete against established players.
And frankly, they're usually right.
Social platforms don't fit traditional business logic. They grow because communities participate. They become more valuable as more people contribute. They defy many of the assumptions we've been taught about business.
But what if there was another way?
What if you could leverage the same participation mechanics that made social media platforms powerful, while combining them with something social media lost years ago:
Prestige.
Authority.
Recognition.
Editorial visibility.
I believe that's what I've built with User-Generated Content Digital Magazines.
These publications use the same fundamental principles that power social platforms. Members contribute content. Contributors gain visibility. Communities create value. Participation drives growth.
The difference is that a magazine carries a level of credibility, authority, and recognition that social media feeds often don't.
What's even more interesting is that unlike the major social platforms, I'm not trying to hoard the model.
I'm licensing it.
Instead of buying competitors, acquiring communities, and consolidating attention, I've made the framework available so brands, associations, nonprofits, thought leaders, industry groups, and businesses can launch their own user-generated content publishing ecosystems.
The global market for user-generated content platforms is projected to grow from roughly $8.5 billion in 2026 to more than $64 billion by 2034. The world is moving toward participation-driven media whether we recognize it or not.
The question isn't whether user-generated content wins.
It already has.
The question is whether organizations will continue renting space on someone else's platform, or whether they'll start building platforms of their own.
So here's the BIG question...
Most businesses spend their entire existence building someone else's platform.
They create content for LinkedIn.
They create content for Facebook.
They create content for Instagram.
They create content for YouTube.
They spend years helping someone else's digital real estate become more valuable.
But what happens when the algorithm changes?
What happens when reach disappears?
What happens when the rules change?
The largest companies in the world don't just participate in platforms.
They own them.
That's why I became obsessed with User-Generated Content Digital Magazines.
They combine the participation mechanics that made social media one of the most powerful business models ever created with the authority, prestige, and credibility of a magazine.
More importantly, they give organizations the opportunity to stop renting attention and start building an asset they actually own.
The question isn't whether user-generated content works.
Facebook proved that.
LinkedIn proved that.
Reddit proved that.
The question is whether your industry, community, association, brand, or business should have a platform of its own.
If you've ever wondered what it would look like to launch a User-Generated Content Digital Magazine in your niche, explore the framework here:
You may discover that the next great media platform in your industry doesn't need to be built from scratch.
It may simply need to be launched.
What industry do you think is missing its own User-Generated Content Digital Magazine?
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