Whopper Sacrifice

Earlier this year Burger King launched a marketing campaign that I absolutely loved called the "Whopper Sacrifice". The idea behind it was that for every ten Facebook friends a person deleted they would get a free Whopper. This campaign brings up an interesting point. How much are your Facebook friends worth to you? Everyone loves to pretend they don't care about how many "virtual" friends they have but if this were true we would all have cashed in our friends for a delicious heap of flame broiled (and then briefly microwaved) Whoppers. Facebook friends are a valued currency but the question is what kind?

The more Facebook friends a person has, the more influence they posses over the Faecbook world. For instance, since I usually post links to new blog entries on Facebook, the amount of traffic this blog receives is directly influenced by my number of Facebook friends. This currency is less monetary as it is reputational. An increase in friends equates to an increase in overall social capital. This is why Chris Anderson describes Facebook as the world's largest closed market of reputational currency. A blogger named Jason Kottke used the Whopper Sacrifice to estimate Facebook's overall value.

"Facebook has 150 million users and the average user has 100 friends. Each friendship requires the assent of both friends so really each user can, on average only get credit for ending half of their friendships. The price of a Whopper is approximately $2.40. That means that each user's friendship is worth around 5 Whoppers, or $12. Do the math and:

$12/user x 150M users= $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook."

I ask anyone who reads this to leave a monetary value for what it would be worth for them to not lose 100 Facebook friends. For me personally I would say it is around $15-$20.