What’s Facebook worth to you? | Boston Globe

Clearly Russia needs to reevaluate its propaganda investment strategy...

"The Tufts experiment echoed a similar study published earlier this year by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In this study, about 2,900 people were asked how much money they would accept in exchange for doing without Facebook for one month. The researchers found that the typical user would give up Facebook for about $50 a month, or about $600 per year.

MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues also sought to measure the value of other free online services — and several turned out to be much more valuable than Facebook. Google, for example: people asked more than $17,500 a year to give up its Internet search service; for e-mail, they wanted about $8,400; and $3,600 to get along without online maps.

Why do people value these services so much more highly than Facebook? Because much as they love Facebook, people can live without it. Not so for digital maps, e-mail, and online search."

What’s Facebook worth to you? | Boston Globe