Business
YouTube, Netflix, Google, Facebook: these digital platforms and services have all become seemingly indispensable and inescapable parts of modern life. But how much do users truly value ostensibly free online services? How much would it be worth to you to walk away from them? That often depends strongly on how you use it. Associate professor Felix Eggers found out that for the average person, 50 dollars a month was enough to convince them to unfriend Facebook for a month. Eggers contributed to research looking into the value of not using digital platforms, which is something quite different from the value of using them, and came up with a new way to measure the economic impact of platforms where the users themselves may be the most valuable product of all.