How Much Would You Pay NOT to Live in 1989?

I highly recommend The Indicator, a very short podcast that tells compelling economic stories, and this recent episode (Internet a la Carte) about a white paper (Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being) that attempts to measure how people value free services on the internet is typical of the show-- it's a fascinating premise: asking people how much they would pay yearly not use a particular internet service and using this data to value the services-- but it also seems that the numbers are somehow skewed; Cardiff Garcia and Stacey Vanek Smith discuss this for a moment, but then the rest of the thinking is up to you . . . there is  definitely something weird about the median values and how much time people spend on each service . . . it seems as if social media is undervalued, especially since the companies that provide these services are worth so much money, but perhaps social media is just a guilty pleasure and could easily be replaced by disco dancing, roller-blading, duck-pin bowling, gin, or latch-hook . . . anyway, these are the numbers-- they are strange but interesting, especially since if you paid for all of these services, you'd be out quite a bit of cash:

1) All Search Engines $17, 500

2) All Email  $8,5 00

3) All Maps  $3, 500

4) All Video  $1,100

5) All E-Commerce  $850

6) All Social Media  $322.