How much would you pay to use Google?
A scientific paper asks an interesting question: how much would you pay to be able to use Google? The economists asked a test panel to see what the economic value of the services we use online is. We all know now that if something is free, we ourselves are the product. But how expensive do we actually sell our skin? And where can we really do without, whatever it costs?
The question was as follows: how much do we have to pay as an Internet user to stop using certain services for a year? These services covered different aspects of our digital life, but it was striking for the researchers how much value the respondents attached to the use of search engines.
People wanted to renounce their navigation apps and tomtoms for a mere $ 3,600 per year, they wanted to miss e-mail for $ 8,400 per year, but search engines ? In order to no longer use it for a year, the researchers had to get a lot of work. For less than $ 17,500, no respondent wanted to state his or her search engine (s) for that period.
But why?
The goal was to find out what exactly the economic value of all those free services is. If you look at the official economic figures, only the amount of money actually paid for services is counted, but the reality is that we exchange our data against services, and that also has a value. Normally it is viewed from the perspective of the provider: for how much can that data be sold or used, but nobody had yet looked at what the economic value is for us as users of all those services that we have now become pretty dependent on. It distorts the Gross National Product rather, because that exchange is not included.
Anyway: answer the question just for yourself: how much would you like to be able to use no search engine for a year? Personally, they would have to pay me an annual salary, otherwise it stops, but even if you’re not in a business where you constantly have to look up all sorts of things, you might be shocked by how much time you save each day by looking for everything ‘equally’ . Ask someone in sales but what it should cost to no longer use navigation, someone who is social media addicted to Facebook Instagram or Snapchat .
And then we should not think about not using apps like WhatsApp or SMS. Imagine: a whole year only everyone should call . The average Millenial does not work under the barrel, I guess. No, those services are worth a lot, you can assume that. And if you think: “do me those peaks,” Samsung has a nice phone for you.