Free- The Value Vampire

The internet today is flooded with free products and services. You can get books for free, music albums, audio products, software, even medical advice, and consultancy services. The authenticity seems to have lost in between these free products and services. The value that we derive from these products is decreasing comparatively to the cost we pay in return. Technological giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder silently creeping into our lives, changing our culture while concealing our eyes with latest trends of selfies, hashtags, live story and what not. These innovations are presented to users as the best way of communicating and connecting with anyone around the world. While they are up with a FREE tag, we end up trading our privacy, time and personal data for these giant to make profit. Millennials appears so worried about ‘likes’, ‘follow counts’, ‘favourites’, ‘emoticons’ and are often completely lost and disconnected with the real world. The numbers are troublesome when you come to face it.
The average person spends nearly two hours (approx. 116 minutes) on social media every day, which translates to a total of 5 years and 4 months spent over a lifetime. Astonishingly, teens spend up to 9 hours a day. Of course, total time spent beats the time spent eating, drinking, socializing and grooming. Facebook alone has 955 million users, that’s the 13% of the world population. And this time and number of users are only expected to increase as platform develop further. These social media platforms are enjoying and minting money by offering their services for free, people have fallen prey to this free trap and might even agree that these free platforms aren’t even worth their time if they come to think about it.
Only because it’s free, people are largely engaged the whole day with social media. Yes, ‘free’ can be an intimidating word, but don’t forget to look at it from a business perspective, the goal of every business is to make money, after all. In this case, the cost is too high, not only we are trading our privacy and personal information to these giants, we are also moving towards more isolated space that we are creating for ourselves. We present an idealised version of ourselves to the world through these platforms and accept inflated perception of happiness and well-being of others. More than that, US psychologists claim that, social media sites like Twitter, Facebook are causing more people to feel alone, isolated and also leads to insomnia. This study is not limited to millennials only, 6 out of 10 employees spends more time visiting social media sited during their work. Guess who tops the charts? Facebook unapologetically accounts for 41%, followed by LinkedIn with 37%, YouTube 13% and these employees are interrupted once every 10.5 minutes by IMs, Tweets and Facebook messages. After checking these notifications, it takes 23 minutes for these social media users to get back on task. Which not only hinders the productivity, but also affects the company’s performance. If you look at the larger picture, it costs the economy, just like it costs American economy 650 billion dollars per year which is 7 times more than the time lost to smoking.
We humans have a tendency of not valuing and overusing what is given to us for free. Growing users of social media is one classic example. Guaranteed minimum income put some more light on this phenomenon, GMI system guarantees that all citizens or families have a sufficient income to live on, where the primary goal is to eradicate poverty. Countries including Cyprus, France, The US have adopted such policies and in a way, gave a choice to its people whether to work or not. Unfortunately, it largely has backfired and has encouraged people not to work because population is happy living off the government subsidy. Resulting in burden on economy and increase in unemployment. In other words, much of what is free actually takes value away from us by taking our time, creating hassle and make us lazy.
The numbers are undoubtedly alarming. And technology refusal is not what is being pointed at, in no way technology can exist as a separate entity from society, it will always be an extension of humans. Despite consuming a lot of our time, Facebook does help us to stay connected with anyone sitting in a different part of the world, it gives a window to people with autism and social disorders to socialize with others, helps us to empathize and lift mood of our friends and also helps us to stay updated on what’s happening around. But people tend to value things more if they are scarce and limited. According to ‘Scarcity Principle’, when a product is scarce, consumers are faced with conducting their own cost-benefit analysis, in which they would sum benefits associated with the product and then subtract cost associated with it. So that its true value can be derived. For example, the price of gold and aluminum, since gold is very rare and relatively expensive to produce, the cost is high comparatively to aluminum which is in abundance and can be found everywhere. Therefore, we can conclude that limited things are more valuable.
So, how can we derive true value out of these social media platforms?
To put things in perspective, let’s review facebook’s revenue model. In order to maximize revenue, Facebook uses the information it collects from us (users) and trades it to companies who are demanding the use of that information to target users better. But if we want Facebook to protect our privacy and get rid of those advertisements then we need to pay them for the privilege. The idea is simple, if we are paying Facebook then it doesn’t have to trade our data to companies because then it has more incentive to keep its paying customers content. Therefore, a subscription plan might actually work for Facebook and benefit users. Facebook and other social media platforms can integrate a subscription model, wherein there would be a limit on requests we send, a status we update, pictures/videos we upload for free. One way or other, we end up paying, currently through our important data.
So, would you be willing to pay Facebook or other social media platforms? Or next time when you log in, would you ask a question to yourself what is the true value of such free services?