Sharecropping is a better metaphor.<p>Facebook owns the audience (land), but they don&#x27;t yet have the ability to fully satisfy (farm) that audience. So they direct traffic out to publishers who provide content to fulfill that demand. Like sharecropping, they split the revenue.<p>Of course, there&#x27;s a reason that sharecropping has a bad name: all the power is held by the owner (Facebook). They can, and probably will, shift to a model of owning the content directly.<p>In 10 years, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if most publishers were dead, replaced by Facebook directly paying creators. (We can already see this in television, with Netflix directly producing their own content.)