Facebook's customers are paying for ad services. If we market those "products and services" to which you refer -- I suspect they are not the ad services sold b

Facebook's customers are paying for ad services. If we market those "products and services" to which you refer -- I suspect they are not the ad services sold by Facebook -- on their own, what are they worth? More cognitive dissonance. People do not pay to particpate in research studies, even though they may get some "free stuff" in the course of participating in the research. The Facebook "service" is market research and advertising services. Whatever "free stuff" participants may receive in the course of participating is not "products and services" the research sponsor (advertisers), Facebook or anyone else can sell. No one would pay. Facebook users agree to be studied and marketed to by advertisers. As the participants, are providing Facebook with value. They are allowing Facebook to conduct market research and collect the data. If we subtract the Facebook customers - advertisers - then there is no paying customer. Development, maintenance and hosting are expenses necessary to provide the service of conducting the research and services for the paying customer. Users are not Facebook's customers. It matters little if any user says that Facebook has "value" when that same user would also refuse to pay to be a participant in Facebook's research on behalf of advertisers (research sponsors). Whatever "free stuff" users are getting by participating is not worth enough that they would pay for it. Communicating and sharing through websites is valuable. We pay for internet access so we can do that, among other things. Facebook is just an implementation detail.