Quote:Did they? How successful have new media been in getting consumers to pay for their product? Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. are all free to the user. By definition, their product has no value to consumers, since consumers pay nothing for it.
Come on, Mike, now you're just being willfully obtuse. GDP is just a metric, it's not the be-all and end-all of economic activity. Eyeballs have migrated from old media (newspapers, the classified section thereof, etc.) to sites like Facebook and Google because people feel that they derive more benefit from these things. These eyeballs (which can be more precisely measured, categorized, and targeted than was the case with the old media) are the real product, in turn giving more value to the advertisers who are the actual consumers. This is a business decision, and is one of the many revenue streams the new media giants have captured. If these companies follow the same progression as their old media counterparts, they will continue to find new revenue sources as these complete the transition from scrappy start-ups to mature businesses. Plenty of websites that were free when I started reading them 10-15 years ago have switched to a subscriber basis, and some of them I have been willing to shell out money for since.
Of course, some of them won't. We're in a bit of a bubble with tech companies now, and this bubble will eventually shake out in its turn. Not everyone of the services available now will last the decade. This is normal, and is not an indictment of the overall system.
You also ignore that all of these "free" sites require people to shell out for devices, internet service, data plans, electric bills, and the like, and the underlying infrastructure requires fiber optic cables, wireless networks, server farms, climate control for the same, switches and routers, the electricity to run these, all of which has to be manufactured, installed, and serviced. Lotta money being spent keeping all of this up and running. And the reason businesses and consumers are able and willing to pay for these new things is because that the price of each of these new things comes down with improvements in technology and business structure (things like economies of scale, automation, etc.)