Interesting topic, I did read about something similar before... but I couldn't find the link now... As far as I remember they calculated $80/per_user last year only in gmail but I believe is debatable because I believe there are implicit and explicit revenue. For example, if you do a google-search about gmail-revenues you will find a lot of people saying that gmail doesn't make money at all..However, they are weighting the whole thing as standalone...and they must consider Google as a whole...not only gmail...because it wouldn't be fair...and in the end is kind simple the idea: whatever the app is drive, gmail, youtube... they are just channels for data-collection in different-forms...you can later crunched/mined/metadata for selling to advertisers... On Tue, 24 Feb 2015, grarpamp wrote:

Many companies do not charge users of their services. They say things like "It's free and always will be."

Pick any "free" service... Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Match, Reddit, the list goes on and on.

Only the smallest of free services can be supported by someone's personal funds. So for larger services it's well understood that if their users aren't paying them, the money must come from somewhere.

The old model answer of former years was advertising through page ads, clickstreams, referrals and those sorts of obvious and observable things. Combined with burning off stock market offerings.

The new model answer includes all the former ways, plus much deeper profiling and analysis of users, their pictures, messages, interests, locations, etc... all done on the secret unobservable corporate backend, and selling off that metadata to the highest bidders.

And perhaps more dollars from simply lying, violating their publicly posted hole ridden privacy policies, and selling directly identifiable user data as well. Or say taking immunity from prosecution from having given/sold it away to cozy governments.

All of which have monetary values associated with them.

Companies also hide their revenue, costs, and their "active in last three months" vs "dead user" numbers.

Some usable public statements and government/market filings are available. And datacenter and employee costs can be approximated.

There is current value analysis, such as in selling what's hot by this months clicks. And future/lifetime value analysis, such as Target datamining for pregnant women to own. There are also dataset specific values, such as names and addresses vs political alignments.

The values could be represented in $dollars per month per user.

Anyway, question...

Anyone have links to studies made within the last five years that have attempted to calculate the dollar value of datamined users?