研究表明 Facebook在用戶心中的價值遠超其目前價值

Facebook is currently worth some $400 billion dollars to its shareholders. Which might seem like a lot. But a recent study suggests the company is worthmany times more than that, to its users.

對於Facebook的股東來說，Facebook的目前價值約爲4000億美元。這一價值可能看起來很高。但最近的一項研究表明，Facebook在其用戶心中的價值可能要數倍高於這一數值。

"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 economist at Tufts University in Boston.

波士頓塔夫茨大學的經濟學家西恩·B·卡什稱：“我們研究的關鍵點在於，Facebook似乎爲其用戶帶來了更多的價值，也許這是今年以來馬克·扎克伯格最喜聞樂見的事情了。但Facebook似乎給人們帶來了更多歡樂或實用。”

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.

他和他的團隊向來自大學、社區和在線隨機抽取的約1300名Facebook用戶詢問Facebook爲他們的生活帶來的真實價值。

Specifically, they asked users how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate 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.

具體來說，他們詢問了用戶需要被支付多少錢才肯停用他們的帳戶。並且這一獎金是真實的。如果該用戶的開價被實驗團隊所接受，她必須停用她的帳戶，最長時間可達到一年。

And Cash -- remember, that's the actual name of the economist, Cash -- would have to pony up the money. "We did have some budget breaking surprises."

卡什--請記住，這是這位經濟學家的真實姓名（與現金諧音）--將不得不掏錢。“我們確實有一些突破預算的驚喜。”

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.

但是這項驚喜發現究竟有多大呢？卡什和他的團隊發現，平均而言，用戶要求開出超過1000美元的出價，他們才答應關閉賬戶一年。研究人員在《公共科學圖書館期刊》上刊登了這項研究結果。

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 bucks to investors. But actual users seem to prize access to the platform at more than five times that.

如果將Facebook的市值除以用戶數量（超過22億），你會發現每個用戶對投資者而言的價值約爲175美元。但實際上，用戶似乎更重視Facebook，願意花上超過5倍的價錢去獲取使用權限。

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.

這項研究並不是說卡什和他的團隊建議CEO馬克·扎克伯格應該向用戶收取更多的使用費用。他們正在衡量的是所謂的消費者剩餘--或者更簡單地說，是用戶從使用服務中獲得的自己感覺到的額外價值。

"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."

“如果你縱覽發明創造的歷史，就會發現，通常是這樣，即使我們看到發明家從自己的發明裏賺了很多錢，類似愛迪生從燈泡中賺了很多錢，但自他發明燈泡後，燈泡對所有用戶的價值都遠高於愛迪生當時創造的價值。”

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.

然而，無論馬克·扎克伯格喜不喜歡聽，我們都必須指出，如果Facebook繼續永無止境地濫用用戶隱私，可能會讓我們在未來改變對社交網絡應用做出的上述判斷。