The average person would need to be paid more than $1,000 to agree to stop using Facebook for a year, a new study suggests.
As part of a study that was published in PLOS One, researchers conducted auction experiments in which winners were paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year.
{mosads}When Facebook users were paid to deactivate their accounts for the full year, it consistently required more than $1,000, the study found.
The researchers used a second-price auction, meaning that the highest bidder won each auction and paid the second-highest price that was bid.
The researchers write in the study that their results show that Facebook provides large benefits to its users.
“While the measurable impact Facebook and other free online services have on the economy may be small, our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users are large,” the study reads.
The study’s findings come despite a torrent of recent negative publicity that Facebook has endured.
Most recently, The New York Times reported in December that the social media giant allowed tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Netflix to use Facebook users’ personal data at a scale not previously known.
That followed a Times report in November revealing that Facebook was slow to resist Russian efforts to use the platform to affect the 2016 presidential election.