Most users are willing to quit Facebook — for $1,000

Facebook has had a hell of a year. Though the #deleteFacebook movement has gained some traction, there are still billions of users who have stuck it out, through every last privacy scandal.

A study published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday found that many of those users would also be ready to jump ship — for a price. Among 1,258 participants, the study found that the average user would only be willing to deactivate their Facebook account for one year for a $1,000 payout.

Researchers found that users were willing to shut down their profiles for an hour if they were paid a dollar, and required $40 for a Facebook-free week. To sacrifice the privilege of having their private data sold to hundreds of corporations and organizations for a full year, participants required $1,000. Considering Facebook's tanking public image, the unwillingness to part with the social network for a smaller sum may seem surprising, but it also points to what's gotten Facebook this far in the first place.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Part of the reason people stay on Facebook, despite real concerns about how it's used or misused, is quite simply, we still get a lot of joy from it," said researcher Sean Cash, per Motherboard. "You might have over a decade of photos, you might use it to organize study groups … someone in their 20s could have been on Facebook all of their adult life." It looks like CEO Mark Zuckerberg's constant mantra about the Facebook "community" has paid off — he had better hope his users aren't.