I look at the 2015 annual revenue numbers published by these net Since market cap is presumably the fair price for all future activities of the firm (if investors are rational and have complete information) then these are the prices each firm would pay a user for future contribution in the network. Yahoo: $5 B price (recent) offer from 800 MM users = $6.25 per user Google: $401 B market cap on 1.2 B searchers =Â $334.17 per searcher I used unique searchers for Google, which might not capture all of its unique users, but is probably close users search, as anyone using its other products most likely uses search, too.

Some other networks to consider include Yahoo and Google. Twitter: $11.01 B market cap from 310 MM users = Â $35.52 per user The results are interesting (B below stands for billions, MM for millions) I used market capitalization numbers and user numbers available as of June 15, 2016. I thought it valuable to look at a few other large networks that are monetizing customer data. Still, such a course measure gives us a very preliminary start on the value of customer data (at least as claimed by LinkedIn and accepted by Microsoft). Of course many users are more active and therefore more valuable in the LinkedIn network, and indeed some users might not even be real. LinkedIn Value per Customer: With a sale price of $26.2 billion and some 443 million users, a coarse measure of value is $59.14 per user. But what is that data worth in LinkedInâ€™s case? Was it a good value to Microsoft? I examine strategies for data monetization in my book, From Big Data to Big Profits: Success with Data and Analytics. Of course, we contribute data to get a service or benefit back. LinkedIn, like all social media and digital platforms, creates value from customer data. In my recent article of how Microsoft can create value from this transactions, many people rightfully raised the point that data contributed to LinkedIn is given in exchange for networking. The recent announcement of Microsoftâ€™s acquisition of LinkedIn has raised many questions about how Microsoft will monetize this data.

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