Facebook will award $10M in grants to people creating and leading communities, with up to $1M grants for 5 leaders and $50K for 100 more
Paul Sandle / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
In February 2018 Facebook put real money behind its 'groups are the future' push: a $10M grant program for people creating and leading communities, with up to $1M each for five leaders and $50K for 100 more. It was a small experiment in directly paying the humans who generate engagement on the platform.
The playbook then scaled with each crisis: $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 small businesses during COVID-19, another $100M for the news industry split between emergency local-news funding and marketing spend, and $5M for journalists on its new newsletter service. The 2018 community grants were the template — Facebook funding its own content and community supply rather than waiting for it to grow organically.
First-order effects
- 105 community leaders receive direct funding — five at up to $1M, one hundred at $50K — making Facebook one of the few platforms paying group admins as a class.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing for the same attention pool face pressure to formalize their own creator- and community-funding programs, since Facebook is now buying loyalty at the group-leader level where moderation and engagement actually happen.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the later small-business, news-industry, and newsletter grants suggest it does — platform grant-making becomes a standing instrument of competitive strategy, with Facebook deciding which communities, publishers, and businesses survive on its infrastructure via discretionary payouts.
The trend: Facebook's grant programs have grown from a $10M community-leadership experiment into a recurring mechanism for funding the people and businesses that supply its platform with content and engagement.