“How Much GDP Is Facebook Worth?”

“How Much GDP Is Facebook Worth?” by Mike Bird was published on April 3, 2019, on The Wall Street Journal at 10:04 a.m. The piece talks about how Facebook is one of the most-used social media platforms in the world, with a poll asking individuals how much they would need to be paid in order to give up Facebook for a month averaging out to about $42.17. However, it comes to the conclusion, at the hands and brains of economists including MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, that social media is something that has and will continue to boost American economic growth between rates of 0.05 and 0.11 percentage points yearly. This is a statistic that is gathered under GDP-B, which is something that allows for companies and economists to understand the measure of output that takes into consideration the fact that these services are free, and are influenced by other things. The overall conclusion of the article is that the benefit that consumers would derive from Facebook would amount to billions of dollars a year of gross domestic product, which is something that could be poured into research and development of new social media platforms that would permit for the emergence of similar or new ideas. This piece provides a deeper understanding into the value of some of these large companies in a way that many people do not even consider, seeing as how people just use these platforms without often thinking about how much the application they are using is making in that very moment, or how much they could be making under certain circumstances. As a result of this, it is important to understand how these companies and organizations are able to gain such a reputation and stature in society today that they could literally contribute to the GDP if they were to allocate the revenue they are making towards it and pour it into fueling social changes and adjustments. The contribution that these companies make to today’s market are immense, permitting for people to understand that they have a much larger influence on the way that economic activity plays out than they ever might have considered before. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-much-gdp-is-facebook-worth-11554300250?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=10