How Much GDP Is Facebook Worth?
April 03 2019 - 10:34AM
Dow Jones News
By Mike Bird
Some social media users joke that they would pay money to be
able to give it up. But if the benefit consumers derive from
Facebook were included in national accounts, it would have added
tens of billions of dollars a year to gross domestic product, new
research suggests.
A group of economists, including MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson, think
the social-media pioneer would have boosted U.S. economic growth by
between 0.05 and 0.11 percentage points a year under GDP-B, a
measure of output that factors in the use of free services.
The analysis is based in part on how much money a polling sample
of U.S. users of the site would need to be paid to give it up for
one month, which came out at a median level of $42.17. Scaled up to
the population of U.S. Facebook users and spread over the period
since the company was founded in 2003, that works out at a $231
billion increase in welfare.
The political rants of distant cousins and carefully curated
selfies of former classmates may be more valuable than they first
appear.
Write to Mike Bird at Mike.Bird@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 03, 2019 10:19 ET (14:19 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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