Non sequitur of the month: Stunning economics

This installment is inspired by a piece of breathtaking simple-mindedness exhibited by a writer for the Polish leftist site Krytyka Polityczna (it means "political critiques;" think of it as of Polish Huffington Post, with all applicable differences of scale of course). Some guy named Kapela has a review of the movie "The Social Network" in which he writes:

Where does Facebook's worth of 25 billion dollars come from? (...) it means that each account is worth about $50. How come I can't sell it then? I have over 1000 friends, which is more than average. So maybe my account is worth more than $50. No one wants to buy it though.

To clear things up first, the actually relevant reason you can't sell your account is that you don't legally own it; Facebook does. But let's imagine you would be legally able to sell your account. You still wouldn't actually be able to, and the reason is that your account isn't worth $50. It's worth next to nothing. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from selling ads. The possibility of reaching hundreds of millions of people is worth a lot to advertisers, so they are willing to pay a lot for it. The possibility of reaching "over a thousand" of individuals through one account, on the other hand, isn't worth a dime to advertisers, which means a single account would bring zero revenue, which means that it's worth about zero dollars. Now this isn't necessarily true of all accounts; I'm sure that if, say, Barack Obama were to sell his account on ebay, he could get a lot of money for it. But in those cases the account's worth is due in large part to things other than possible future revenue. Assuming that since 500 million accounts are worth $25 billion, 1 account is worth $50, is just dumb.