In 2004, the social network Facebook launched to little fanfare. Today, over 10% of the world’s population has a Facebook account, and the company is worth billions of dollars. But where, exactly, does the value of a social network come from?
In this lesson, students will come up with a quadratic function
to model how a network’s value (measured in terms of the number of connections between users) grows with the number of people using the network. They’ll also discuss who gets the most value out of a social network: the users themselves, or the advertisers vying for likes, comments, and greenbacks.