How Much Will We Have to Pay You to Log Out of Facebook Within a Year?
College students in a recent study required an average of $ 2,076 to leave Facebook for a year . As Ars Technica explains, it wasn’t just a survey – the researchers actually held small auctions to pay the lowest bidder to quit smoking for a day, three days, a week, and a year. That’s not counting the students who declined to charge any price for using Facebook. So, if you haven’t scrolled through the comments yet: how much would you bet?
In the same study, non-students were willing to drop out for about half the money. (Mechanical Turk users demanded about the same as students, but the researchers had no way to force them to close their accounts.) In different auctions, the longer people were asked to log out of Facebook, the more money they received per day. wanted to. But no more, especially when you consider that leaving for a year could mean missing out on the next app or gadget owned by Facebook. Consider this when deciding how much you really want.
Note: The researchers used the second-price auction, a cleverly optimized auction used by Google to sell search ads . The winning bidder only has to pay (or receive only) the bid for second place, which encourages everyone to bid closer to their real ideal price. This is similar to how you can tell eBay what you are actually willing to pay for. If you are still confused about this, Ars’ article explains it in detail.
Researchers come to some confusing conclusions. They compare the value of Facebook’s stock to what those users demanded in exchange for leaving. Since students ask for more money than their “share” of Facebook’s market capitalization, the researchers conclude that in fact they must be getting a lot, even if advertisers are making money from them. They assume that these people are actually making $ 2,000 a year from the social network just because that is the price they are asking to quit. Therefore, they say that Facebook should be a pure commodity for its users. However, we think all of this is evidence that tech addicts will require a lot of money to cleanse themselves.