메시징서비스의 소비자잉여 추정

초록

The economic value of messaging services like KakaoTalk, which we frequently utilize in our daily lives, is challenging to estimate due to the nature of these services being free. Since messaging services incur no monetary cost but only involve a time cost, applying traditional consumer surplus estimation methodologies used for goods and services with clear prices is difficult. Goolsbee & Klenow (2006) estimated the social welfare of internet services by collecting information on the actual time consumers spent on service utilization, instead of relying on surveys of willingness to pay for internet services. They considered the opportunity cost of leisure time spent by individual consumers as their wage and estimated the consumer surplus generated by a specific service by valuing the opportunity cost of the time used during leisure hours. Previous studies from abroad have estimated consumer surplus in time-intensive services such as the internet, Google, YouTube, social media, and automotive navigation, where marginal costs, aside from fixed costs, are very low but considerable time is expended. Similarly, preceding research in Korea has estimated consumer surplus in activities like radio listening, TV viewing, and VOD consumption. In this study, we adopted the methodology of Goolsbee & Klenow (2006) to estimate the social surplus generated by time-intensive services with zero marginal costs, applying it to messaging services. The key aspect of the methodology lies in estimating the consumer surplus created by messaging services, which are both free and time-intensive, by using the opportunity cost of leisure time, measured in wages. We collected and analyzed data Media Diary in the Media Panel Survey from 2018 to 2022, including messaging service usage data and demographic information. The estimated consumer surplus of messaging services per user per month was found to be 45,000 Korean Won. Extrapolating this estimate to the entire user base of KakaoTalk suggests that messaging services generate a consumer surplus of up to 12 trillion Korean Won annually.

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