Teenagers Provide Parents With Free IT Help Worth $5,400 A Year

Teenagers provide their parents with free IT help worth $5,400 a year on average, according to data from UK-based software-testing consultancy Prolifics Testing.

This assistance includes everything from cybersecurity help and data entry to advice on social media and online marketplaces. Added up, the help provided by teenagers would cost parents an average of £4,214 (around $5,413) a year, if carried out by professional freelancers.

Prolifics Testing’s study provides another indication of how the technology sector depends on large amounts of free labour. At a time when billions of people worldwide spend hours everyday generating valuable data for the likes of Facebook and Twitter, it seems that many of us are also providing value to tech companies in other ways.

Free IT Help

For the purposes of its study, Prolifics Testing surveyed 2,664 teenagers between 13 and 18 years old. It asked each participant about the kinds of tech-related tasks they help their parents with, and for how many hours each year.

Unsurprisingly, social media advice came top, with teenagers providing their parents with 32 hours of help every year related to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms.

To find out how much this help would be worth, Prolifics Testing referred to UpWork, where it found an average hourly rate charged by freelancers providing similar services. Multiplying this rate by the number hours, it found that parents would’ve had to have paid $666 to a freelancer for similar social media assistance.

It did this for the other activities and tasks provided for free by teenagers, finding that help with emails and editing videos was worth the most, at £693 ($890) and £651 ($836) per year.

This works out to an impressively substantial sum if you multiply the annual average cost ($5,413) by the number of teenagers in the United States. Counting only teenagers aged between 15 and 19 (20.85 million), Prolifics Testing’s survey would imply that teenagers in the U.S. provide free IT help worth $112.86 billion per year.

Digital Tech And Free Labour

Of course, this is likely an overestimate, given that some teenagers (and parents) are technologically savvier than others. Nonetheless, even if the actual figure is only 10% of $112.86 billion, it still indicates the sheer extent to which the tech sector relies on free labour.

And it’s not only in the area of free IT help that the tech industry relies on unpaid work.

As alluded to above, the profits of social media companies could be construed as the product of all the time social media users spend updating their profiles, responding to posts, and posting their own content. For the average Facebook user, this time equals around 38 minutes per day, or roughly 231 hours per year.

In terms of Facebook’s quarterly revenue ($18.321 billion in Q2 2020), the labour provided by each monthly active user (2.7 billion) is worth $6.79 per quarter, or roughly $27.16 per year. It may seem strange to describe time spent on social media as ‘work,’ but given that Facebook commoditises the activities of users via the data it extracts from them, it’s not unjustified.

We also find similar things in other areas of the tech industry. For example, when you visit a website (such as this one), it almost always downloads cookies to your device, so that its owners can track how you use it (among other things). Again, this is intended to extract data that can be used to target relevant ads at you, which in turn generates revenue for the website.

It’s in this way you end up ‘working’ for the website, insofar as the website is designed to encourage you to spend additional time on it, so that you can provide additional data that would allow the website to generate additional revenue. In other words, a website (or social network, or app) becomes as much a platform for extracting digital labour from its users as it is a platform for providing labour to users (i.e. articles, content, services).

And Prolifics Testing’s survey shows that many of us are called on to provide unpaid technical support so that others can even access this whole system of disguised voluntary work. Meanwhile, Apple, Google, and Facebook generate hundreds of billions in revenue each year…