what it's worth

A few months ago something that was popular with a lot of my Facebook friends was making a point that they would not use Facebook if they had to pay for the service. That's fine. It's their prerogative. It doesn't make much sense to me, though.

I am intrigued by how people value different products and services they buy and use. I have heard of studies (too lazy to look them up right now) that establish that people really have almost no means of independently valuing things, so most people use cues from the less rational areas of the brain to value them. That is why people can value two identical pieces of clothing very differently because they have different labels and why people really thought that hugely inflated house prices from a few years ago were reasonable. People used social cues to value things because the rational cues are lacking.

Going back to Facebook, I think that I would pay for the service so long as the people with whom I cared about keeping in touch also continued to use the service. My position on this should carry some weight because I definitely can be a bit stingy. Facebook certainly has a value to me, and actually much more than some of the other services that I already pay money for. For example, we still get the Kansas City Star on weekends, but I read Facebook much more than I read the Star (I know, I know, I can get news online for free for now, but that's an issue for another post).

My impression is that there are a lot of people who will spend $200 on a cell phone and $100 a month on a data plan to connect to Facebook, among other websites, but they expect that those sites will provide their services for free with minimal advertising and put up a stink at a mere unsubstantiated hint that things could go that way. For now I do not think that Facebook and most other websites can afford the loss of goodwill to make their services paid. Maybe that can last forever and maybe it cannot. Time will tell.