Social media analytics worth seeing. How much I am worth to a search engine or a social media company.

On social media you can access analytics that will tell you how many people saw your your tweets (impressions). The number of retweets, how many people looked at your profile and so on. One metric that is absent is a round figure showing how much you are worth to a social media company, how much your data is worth and how much advertisers value your data. When I next visit the analytics tab on a social media service would it be empowering to see my monetary value represented in euro, pounds, dollars or bitcoin?

The old argument goes that you pay for your shiny new social media service, search engine with your data. You use the service, you generate data, this is then packaged up and sold to advertisers. The problem with this model is the unknown, that is, how much your data is worth and is its value enough to access and use the social media service?

The value a user has for a social media service in euro, dollars, pounds and bitcoin can go up or down. Just like impressions and clicks this value will change. If I accessed via the analytics section of a social media service my value to them today. I might find that today I am worth 2 pence to 0.79 pence but on another day, week, month or year I may find my worth is £10. What do I do with this value I generated for a social media service? Could I cash out? donate the money to a good cause? or choose to re-invest the value of my data back into that same social media service so they can develop new features. Or, if I have generated enough value from my data, I can use it to request access to more pro features on that social media service or search engine.

Social media companies extract value from users from data that is sold to advertisers. This is the business model. All I want to know, when I next visit the analytics tab is how much value I am generating. To have some power over part of that value to for example give it to a charity or a good cause. The remaining value can be kept by the social media company or search engine to develop the service, pay staff and shareholders. Knowing how much you are worth in dollars, pounds or bitcoin has to be better than just knowing how many impressions you earned. What do you think? Is this a feature you would want?