Would you close your Facebook account in exchange for 1,000 euros?

The classic said that of fools is to confuse value with price and, in what has to do with Facebook, a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE comes to confirm this sentence.of the data obtained, Facebook users, a free platform, would only deactivate their account for a year in exchange for 1,000 euros.

Related If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world in terms of population with more than 2.2 billion monthly active users, of which 1.45 billion are active daily, spending an average of 50 minutes every day on Facebook or on their different platforms.This means that, collectively, their users spend more than 100,000 years on this network every day.

However, since they do not pay for the service, the benefit obtained is difficult to measure. To try to do so, this study organized an auction system between about 1,300 subjects to whom Money was offered to deactivate their accounts for one year. The results obtained indicate that the average user of this social network would only be willing to close the profile on Facebook for a year in exchange for about 1,000 euros.

closing the profile on facebook does not compensate

This figure is high enough to think that, despite the concern about the evolution of Facebook in recent times, its users are quite faithful. The suspicions about how the company handles the data of its users or regarding the manipulation of its contents have not been an obstacle for the platform to remain the main social network and the third most visited site on the Internet, after Google and YouTube.

In fact, in the conclusions of their research, the authors state that "despite the negative publicity surrounding the Cambridge Analytics revelations in mid-March 2018, Facebook registered an increase of 70 million users between the end of 2017 and March 31, 2018.This suggests that the value that users obtain from the social network more than compensates for concerns about their privacy."

With their study, researchers try to bring new elements of discussion to the Solow paradox, named after Robert Solow , Nobel Prize in 1987, who observed that the technological revolution has not been accompanied by a growth in productivity but, on the contrary, today the average production of a worker in the US doubles every 37 years instead of every 25 years, as it happened in the period from the postwar period to the years 60.

However, the authors of this study believe that these figures on productivity do not take into account the social value provided by networks such as Facebook, which is not reflected in the GDP.