2018 was a rough year for Facebook as the company faced Congressional hearings, a mountain of bad press from data leaks, and more. With the added pressure many users have expressed their desire to walk away from Facebook. What would it take for you to actually walk away from Facebook? According to a new study, most people would want $1,000 or more to walk away from
The authors of the study, Jay R. Corrigan, Saleem Alhabash, Matthew Rousu, and Sean B. Cash, conclude that because of this, Facebook does provide some value to its users. These researchers used an auction model to entice users to walk away from Facebook. Some users were willing to walk away for $1.84 an hour, some for $15.73 for three days, and others for $38.83 for a week. When the researchers finally posed the question of how much it would take to walk away for an entire year, u
Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year.
Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. While the measurable impact Facebook and other free online services have on the economy may be small, our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users are large.
Without a doubt, users love using Facebook and many seemingly don’t care what the company is doing with their data. Be sure to hit the link below to check out the full research paper.
What do you think of this study? How much would it take for you to walk away from Facebook? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also comment on our MeWe page by joining the MeWe social network.
[button link=”https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207101″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Plos One[/button]Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
