Valuing social media use at minimum wage is hardly a perfect measure, since, for example, it’s more practical to surf Facebook while waiting in line for coffee than to use those few minutes doing remote freelance work. But as a general approximation, it reveals that people place enormous value on social media usage, yet only a small fraction of that value is visible to economists as revenue. Wikipedia is an even more extreme example: its official contribution to GDP is basically zero. The same analysis applies to countless web- and app-based services.
