Dollar Value of a Datamined "Free" Service User?

[JP]

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?