Cough up at least Rs 70,000 to make someone quit Facebook: Researchers

Using a series of auctions, in which people were actually paid to close their accounts for as little as one day or as long as one year, the researchers found that Facebook users would require an average of more than $1,000 to deactivate their account for one year.

“We know people must derive tremendous value from Facebook or they wouldn’t spend millions of hours on the site every day. The challenge is how to put a dollar value on a service people don’t pay for,” said study’s first author Jay Corrigan, Professor of Economics at Ohio-based Kenyon College.

Facebook, with more than 2.2 billion global users, is among the social media websites that provide access at no cost, so the auctions created by the research team posed the question in reverse as to what amount of money would you require to give up your Facebook account for some fixed period of time, ranging from one day to one year? The work began as independent efforts by two teams, Saleem Alhabash at Michigan State University and Sean B Cash at Tufts University and Corrigan at Kenyon College with Matthew Rousu of Susquehanna University. The researchers ran three actual auctions. Winners were paid upon proof that their membership was deactivated for the set period of time. It also contrasts FB’s market capitalisation with the value placed on it by its users. For example, based on a market valuation of approximately $400 bn, and about 2.2 bn users, the market value would be approximately $180 per user, or less than one-fourth of the annual average value of Facebook access from any of the auction samples.