For all its faults, Facebook has become a nearly inescapable part of modern life.
It鈥檚 not just that it鈥檚 a place to find out what your friends and acquaintances are up to, or store and share your photos, or meet like-minded people in groups built around shared interests.
It鈥檚 because Facebook offers all of those functions on one platform 鈥� as well as 1.5 billion active daily users.
Add in the 800 million more people who Facebook claims sign in at least once a month, and approximately 30 per cent of the world鈥檚 population is using the service.
It鈥檚 enough to make one wonder just what it would take to get people to give up their Facebook accounts.
A group of American researchers recently put that question to the test, attempting to determine exactly how highly people value their Facebook accounts by asking them how much money they would want in exchange for abandoning the social network.
To encourage realistic answers, the researchers first asked the participants to name a price for giving up their shoes, and then took the shoes of the person who asked for the least money.
Their study, which was published in the journal , found that Facebook users, on average, said it would take US$6.01 for them to give up their account for one day and US$38.83 for them to do it for one week. Three separate groups were asked about deactivating Facebook for one year, with average responses ranging from US$1,139 to US$2,076 鈥� which equate to between US$3.12 and US$5.69 per day.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 find it at all incredible to think that the participants in our studies might on average value this at a few dollars a day,鈥� Sean Cash, an economist at Tufts University in Boston and one of the study鈥檚 authors, told CTVNews.ca.
Cash compared the idea to charity campaigns encouraging people to sponsor people in developing countries, which often frame the cost of their request in terms of dollars per day.
Could Facebook charge fees?
Some analysts have speculated that Facebook might try charging its users, at some point, in order to raise revenue and appease shareholders.
The finding that users see significant value in having access to Facebook might seem to suggest that they would be willing to pay a comparatively small fee to maintain that access 鈥� but Cash doesn鈥檛 see it that way.
鈥淢y gut tells me that Facebook can鈥檛 do that, or at least not for very long,鈥� he said.
鈥淭hey might get a few subscribers for a while, but I think it鈥檇 the fast track to irrelevance for their platform.鈥�
The problem, he says, is that even though Facebook鈥檚 users clearly value the platform, it is difficult to translate that benefit into actual payments. In this way, Cash compares Facebook to clean air and clean water.
鈥淲e don鈥檛 pay for them, but that doesn鈥檛 mean we don鈥檛 value them,鈥� he said.
Users鈥� value to Facebook
So the Facebook experience might be worth a lot to the people who use the platform 鈥� at least as long as it stays free 鈥� but what are those users worth to Facebook?
Facebook releases 鈥渁verage revenue per user鈥� figures with its quarterly financial reports.
The , made public last week, shows that Facebook took in US$7.37 from its average user during the final quarter of 2018.
There are stark geographic disparities, with American and Canadian users averaging US$34.86 worth of revenue for Facebook per quarter, compared to US$10.98 for European users and US$2.96 for Asian users.
The difference, Facebook says, is that North American users are much more likely to make in-app purchases than users in other parts of the world.
Regardless of where they live, though, it seems the value most people think they鈥檙e getting out of Facebook is far more than the value Facebook says it鈥檚 getting from them.
