Congratulations! You're Going to Make More Money for Facebook!

Good news: You are increasing in value!

Facebook, like other social networks, makes the bulk of its money by showing people advertising, and by crunching a few numbers, it’s relatively easy to determine just how much money each user brings in. It’s known in the financial world as “average revenue per user,” or ARPU, and last quarter, each U.S. Facebook user generated $9.30 for the company, $8.63 of which came from advertising.

Research firm eMarketer expects those numbers to grow by 2017. A lot, actually. EMarketer predicts Facebook’s ad revenue per user will increase more than 37 percent over the next two years, and as much as 50 percent for U.S. users. That kind of growth isn’t uncommon, though; ad revenue per user worldwide jumped 27 percent in the past year alone, so it’s actually going to slow a bit moving forward. (This is common when the revenue and user numbers get as big as Facebook’s.)

Here’s a look at the projected growth.

eMarketer

There are really two main ways for Facebook to increase your value. It can either increase its ad volume (i.e. show you more ads) or it can start charging marketers more money for the ads it already shows you. In Facebook’s case, there’s a good chance it’ll be a little bit of both. Of course, showing more ads may or may not become a nuisance for users, but Facebook has been careful in the past about trying not to anger its user base with too many ads.

Facebook isn’t the only place where your stock is rising. Twitter’s ad revenue per user globally is expected to grow, too, by more than 62 percent in the next two years. Again, more ads and more expensive ads are likely on the way.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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