The digital economy provides a number of services for which the marginal price (given an internet connection) is zero: games like Candy Crush, email, web searches, access to information and entertainment, and many more. Because users are not paying an additional price for using these services, this form of economic output doesn’t seem to be captured by conventional economic statistics. Leonard Nakamura, Jon Samuels , and Rachel Soloveichik offer some ways of thinking about the question in in “Measuring the `Free’ Digital Economy within theGDP and Productivity Accounts, written for the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, an independent UK research center funded by Britain’s Office of National Statistics (December 2017, ESCoE Discussion Paper 2017-3).

Essentially, they propose that the economic value of “free” content can be measured by the marketing and advertising revenue that it generates. In other words, you “pay” for “free” content not with money, but by selling a slice of your attention to advertising. Thus, their approach is a practical application of the saying: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” They write:

”Free” digital content is pervasive. Yet, unlike the majority of output produced by the private business sector, many facets of the digital economy (e.g., Google, Facebook, Candy Crush) are provided without a market transaction between the final user of the content and the producer of the content. … Furthermore, because these technologies are so pervasive and have induced large changes in consumer behavior and business practice, these open questions have evolved into arguments that the exclusion of these technologies from the national accounts leads to a significant downward bias in official estimates of growth and productivity.

The first contribution of this paper is to provide an argument that, yes, it is possible to measure many aspects of the ”free” digital economy via the lens of a production account. … To be clear at the outset, this approach does not provide a willingness to pay or welfare valuation of the “free” content. But this approach does provide an estimate of the value of the content that is consistent with national accounting estimates of production.