2018 had been one of the worst years for Facebook with incessant data breaches and internal conflicts. Despite the risk of privacy risks involved in using the social media platform, many people are still willing to take the risk and not ready to quit Facebook.
A study published in the journal PLOS ONE reveals that it will take just more than $1,000 for users to deactivate their Facebook account for one year. The study intends to calculate the “consumer surplus” which, in terms of economics, is “the difference between the total amount that consumers are willing and able to pay for a good or service and the total amount that they actually do pay.”
The study involved three different auctions to calculate the money a US user places on Facebook. Two auctions were conducted with students at universities and one with the adults using Amazon Mechanical Turk — a crowdsourcing internet marketplace.
In the auction, the participants placed bids of the amount for which they are willing to quit Facebook for one year. The bid ranged between $1,139 and $2,076. It goes without saying that the person who bid the lowest amount was considered as the winner.
One interesting fact emerged in the bidding was that the users who used Instagram and Snapchat more than Facebook, bid lower amount. It suggests that users can live without Facebook if they are allowed to use the alternatives.
According to Sean Cash, an economist involved in the study: “Part of the reason people stay on Facebook, despite real concerns about how it’s used or misused, is quite simply, we still get a lot of joy from it.”
One of the reasons why it’s difficult to quit Facebook for many people now is the attachment that people have developed with Facebook over the years. Cash explained this by saying, “You might have over a decade of photos, you might use it to organize study groups … someone in their 20s could have been on Facebook all of their adult life.”
The study evaluates the cost of benefits offered by Facebook and if the cost is provided to the users, they can quit the data-hungry platform.
How much money amount you would need to quit Facebook for one year? Tell us in the comments.
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