Facebook Is Taking Credit for the Money Given in the Ice Bucket Challenge

Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? It seems like such a long time ago that friends were posting videos guilting each other into pouring water on their head and donating money to fight the neurodegenerative disease ALS, but it was really just last summer. Now a ne​w study commissioned by Facebook says the social network should get credit for the $100​ million-plus that Ice Bucket Challenge participants donated.

In fact, the study says Facebook contributed much more than that to the global economy in 2014, "enabling" an estimated $227 billion and 4.5 million jobs in 2014 alone. Given that Exxon Mobil estimated its own wider economic impact on the globe was $150 billion in the first nine months of 2014, Facebook's impact looks impressively massive.

"By helping businesses connect with new and existing customers, and by helping developers share their apps with the world, the Facebook community is creating a lot of jobs and economic opportunity around the world," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a recent post trumpeting the study, which Facebook commissioned from the professional services company Deloitte.

Facebook itself counted just over 8,300 employees in 2014 and $2.2 billion net income for the first nine months (full year figures are due out soon), all of which has been excluded from Deloitte's study. That means the $227 billion and 4.5 million jobs that Facebook is said to have helped create came on top of all the people it employees and money it makes directly.

To Deloitte's credit, the study contains a wealth of data and is fairly clear in outlining its methodology. The company looked at over 2,000 small and medium-sized businesses around the world that rely on Facebook, and used a systematic approach to convert their Facebook Page "Likes" into actual dollars earned for those businesses. It also tried to put a dollar amount on the data people use while looking at Facebook on their phones and computers.

Deloitte also included the people employed and money generated by huge companies such as Spotify and King (maker of Candy Crush Saga), which have Facebook apps.

However, the Deloitte study should also be taken with a few big asterisks. For one thing, it explicitly doesn't include the amount of money and jobs lost thanks to Facebook supplanting other businesses, such as classified ads in newspapers or video advertisements on TV.

For another, it begins with a lengthy disclaimer saying that the report was prepared only for Facebook's use, not any third parties (read: us journalists or other companies), which makes it seem like Facebook released it only to toot its own horn. As one particularly helpful line reads: "no party other than Facebook Inc. is entitled to rely on the Report for any purpose whatsoever and Deloitte accepts no responsibility or liability or duty of care to any party other than Facebook Inc. in respect of the Report and/or any of its contents."

Deloitte also makes it clear the the study contains information that's not exactly bulletproof, saying it "has neither sought to corroborate this information nor to review its reasonableness."

Still, Deloitte's content to give Facebook the credit for the funds raised by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, writing: "Businesses also benefit when people share links to their websites with their friends. Sharing of links can have significant effects on sales and fundraising. For example, Facebook helped spread awareness about the 'ice bucket challenge' initiative that raised $100m in donations to fund research for the cure of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)."

It's hardly the first time Deloitte has published a study like this. Back in 2012, it published a study focused on Facebook's economic impact in Europe, also undertaken at the social networking giant's request. That study included a very similar disclaimer discouraging people from reading too much into the results.