People love Facebook so much they wouldn’t quit unless we paid them a lot

Figuring Facebook’s value to its users could help explain why people are seemingly so willing to sacrifice their privacy — and ignore controversies — in exchange for being part of the world’s largest social network. That’s about one-fifth the value the average participant in our study derived from Facebook in just one year, meaning that Facebook creates significantly more value for its users than it does for its shareholders. Regulations making social networks less enjoyable or less useful, even if they only marginally shave away the benefit the average user enjoys, would translate to billions of dollars in lost value when applied to the billions of people who have remained Facebook users.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com