The actual amount of consumer welfare from new digital products and services might be quite high, even if measures of gross domestic product value them at zero.
Products with zero price are difficult to value. Measures of gross domestic product measure goods with prices, so any products with a zero price are not reflected in our GDP or productivity statistics.
Although information goods have become increasingly ubiquitous and important in our daily lives, the official share of the information sector as a fraction of the total nominal GDP (about four percent to five percent) was the same in 2016 as it was 35 years earlier. That might strike you as odd, and that is precisely the problem.
Facebook users spent 50 minutes per day on Facebook and Instagram, up from zero in 2005. The same might be noted for any number of other digital apps. They either created completely new goods that did not exist before, or replaced and significantly improved previously existing non-digital goods.
The average American spent about 22.5 hours each week online as of 2018, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, and Felix Eggers in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but much of the value of that time cannot be captured by normal GDP metrics.
In many areas, such as music, media, and encyclopedias, people substitute zero-price online services such as Spotify, YouTube, and Wikipedia for goods with a positive price such as CDs, DVDs, and Encyclopedia Britannica.
As a result, the total revenue contribution of these sectors to GDP figures can fall even while consumers get access to better quality and more variety of digital goods, the authors note.
The authors estimate that digital products actually add as much as $32,000 in actual economic value per person.
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