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科学美国人60秒 SSS Facebook Users Value the Service More Than Investors Do

时间:2019-05-07 06:55:39

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Facebook Users Value the Service More Than Investors1 Do

Facebook is currently worth some $400 billion dollars to its shareholders2. 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 seems 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 economist3 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 deactivate4 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 pony5 up the money. 

"We did have some budget breaking surprises."

But how big of a surprise? Cash and his team found that, on 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. [Jay R. Corrigan et al., How much is social media worth? Estimating the value of Facebook by paying users to stop using it]

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 bucks6 to investors. 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.

—Christopher Intagliata

[The above text is a transcript7 of this podcast.]


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1 investors dffc64354445b947454450e472276b99     
n.投资者,出资者( investor的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • a con man who bilked investors out of millions of dollars 诈取投资者几百万元的骗子
  • a cash bonanza for investors 投资者的赚钱机会
2 shareholders 7d3b0484233cf39bc3f4e3ebf97e69fe     
n.股东( shareholder的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • The meeting was attended by 90% of shareholders. 90%的股东出席了会议。
  • the company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders 公司对股东负有的受托责任
3 economist AuhzVs     
n.经济学家,经济专家,节俭的人
参考例句:
  • He cast a professional economist's eyes on the problem.他以经济学行家的眼光审视这个问题。
  • He's an economist who thinks he knows all the answers.他是个经济学家,自以为什么都懂。
4 deactivate oy8xP     
v.使无效;复员
参考例句:
  • Russia is deactivating some of its deadliest missiles.俄罗斯正在拆除其一些最危险的导弹。
  • I go through several complex steps to try to "deactivate" my profile.我尝试了那些复杂的步骤,试图“撤销”我的个人资料。
5 pony Au5yJ     
adj.小型的;n.小马
参考例句:
  • His father gave him a pony as a Christmas present.他父亲给了他一匹小马驹作为圣诞礼物。
  • They made him pony up the money he owed.他们逼他还债。
6 bucks a391832ce78ebbcfc3ed483cc6d17634     
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
参考例句:
  • They cost ten bucks. 这些值十元钱。
  • They are hunting for bucks. 他们正在猎雄兔。 来自《简明英汉词典》
7 transcript JgpzUp     
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书
参考例句:
  • A transcript of the tapes was presented as evidence in court.一份录音带的文字本作为证据被呈交法庭。
  • They wouldn't let me have a transcript of the interview.他们拒绝给我一份采访的文字整理稿。

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