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(单词翻译)
This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
Facebook is currently worth some $400 billion dollars to its shareholders1. Which might seem like a lot. But a recent study suggests the company is worth many times more than that, to its users.
"Basically our punch line is that Facebook does seem to bring value to its users, and maybe that's the nicest thing anybody has said about Mark Zuckerberg all year. But it does seem to bring joy or utility to people." Sean B. Cash is an economist2 at Tufts University in Boston.
He and his team asked some 1,300 Facebook users, from colleges, community, and online samples, to put a dollar number on the value the social network brings to their lives. Specifically, they asked users how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate3 their accounts. And the stakes were real. If a user's offer was accepted, she'd have to deactivate her account, for up to a year. And Cash — remember, that's the actual name of the economist, Cash — would have to pony4 up the money.
"We did have some budget breaking surprises."
But how big of a surprise? Cash and his team found that, o?n average, users asked for more than $1,000 dollars in exchange for shutting down their accounts for a year. They reported the results in the journal PLOS ONE.
If you divide Facebook's market capitalization by its number of users — more than 2.2 billion — you'd find that each user is worth about $175 bucks5 to investors6. But actual users seem to prize access to the platform at more than five times that.
Not that Cash and his team are suggesting CEO Mark Zuckerberg should charge that much for access. What they're measuring instead, is what's called consumer surplus — or more simply put, the additional perceived value — that users get from using the service.
"If you think about the history of innovation in general, it's often the case, even when we see somebody like Edison making a lot of money off of the lightbulb, the value to all the users of the lightbulb since then has been much higher than whatever fortune he made."
Facebook's never-ending string of privacy missteps, though, might affect whether we'll say the same of the social network in the future. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
1 shareholders | |
n.股东( shareholder的名词复数 ) | |
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2 economist | |
n.经济学家,经济专家,节俭的人 | |
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3 deactivate | |
v.使无效;复员 | |
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4 pony | |
adj.小型的;n.小马 | |
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5 bucks | |
n.雄鹿( buck的名词复数 );钱;(英国十九世纪初的)花花公子;(用于某些表达方式)责任v.(马等)猛然弓背跃起( buck的第三人称单数 );抵制;猛然震荡;马等尥起后蹄跳跃 | |
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6 investors | |
n.投资者,出资者( investor的名词复数 ) | |
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