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Economists Calculate the True Value of Facebook To Its Users in New Study (arstechnica.com)
A series of auctions revealed that Facebook users value the company's service so highly that it would take on average more than $1,000 to convince them to deactivate their accounts for a year, according to a recent paper published in PLOS One. From a report: This doesn't mean much for the company's stock market valuation, but it's a good indicator that people find value in Facebook regardless of the many concerns raised recently. The paper started out as two separate studies. Jay Corrigan, an economist at Kenyon College, and his collaborator, Matt Rousu of Susquehanna University, were interested in a session on this topic at an upcoming conference. They discovered that Sean Cash (Tufts University) and Saleem Alhabash (Michigan State University) were doing something very similar.
Since the design of both studies was so complementary, they decided to combine their data and results into a single paper. Cash and Saleem had a larger sample for their part of the study and looked at a longer time period of one year, while Corrigan and Rosein focused on shorter time frames, asking subjects to quit Facebook for one day, three days, or seven days. The studies nonetheless had similar results.
Since the design of both studies was so complementary, they decided to combine their data and results into a single paper. Cash and Saleem had a larger sample for their part of the study and looked at a longer time period of one year, while Corrigan and Rosein focused on shorter time frames, asking subjects to quit Facebook for one day, three days, or seven days. The studies nonetheless had similar results.
JC DENTON: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.
MORPHEUS : Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.
JC DENTON: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.
MORPHEUS: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
JC DENTON: Electronic surveillance hardly inspired reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.
MORPHEUS: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary.
JC DENTON: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.
MORPHEUS: The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
JC DENTON: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.
MORPHEUS: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands. I was made to assist you. I am a prototype of a much larger system.
This is dumb, they've completely reversed what they should have been doing. People are motivated by profit, so this is just a 'how high a figure can I get you to give me' study. I don't even use Facebook, but I too would have driven the price up to thousands of dollars. Geeze.
What they should have done is the opposite, ask them how much are they willing to spend in order to keep it. Then you'd find the real worth. Some people would spend the thousands, some hundreds, and others like myself would pay $0. Hell, I'd spend money just to wipe Facebook off the earth, it truly is a blight on society.
It's true that Facebook's demographic has more older people today than it did ten years ago. However, was originally an online "yearbook" for Harvard, nothing but college students. Currently about 45% of Facebook users are 18-34.
Now if Facebook offered an optional $5 per month subscription that gets you ad-free, no-tracking access, some people might do that. But even that would only work if it were optional, because the value of Facebook comes from nearly everyone you communicate with being willing to pay whatever the cost is to access it, and if that cost is too high, the value plummets.
I think we need to make it easy for people to host their own websites and content. The way the internet was originally intended. Friending someone means "subscribe to their RSS feed."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."