It takes $50 a month to convince people to give up Facebook, new research shows

How much do people value Facebook? By about $50 a month, according to a recent study of 2885 people by economists at the University of Groningen and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The most valued service was search engines, with respondents giving a median of $17,530 as the price at which they would give up Internet searches for one year. This was followed by email ($8,414), and digital maps ($3,648). Video streaming such as YouTube and Netflix was valued at $1,173 a year. Online shopping was valued at $842, social media at $322, music at $168, and instant messaging at $155.

Value perceived from free products

‘Our study aims to measure how much value people perceive from free products like Facebook’, said said Felix Eggers, assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business and an author of the working paper along with Erik Brynjolfsson and Avinash Gannamaneni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can read about their results in full on the FEB Blog.

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