There’s so many “new” media options out there — YouTube, blogs, podcasting, torrents — that it would be a brave soul who tried to calculate what the “new media” industry is worth. But the Boston Consulting Group has had a bash, calculating that Australians get $24 billion of “value” from new media, over and above what they actually pay for it.
In a study commissioned by Google, BCG also predicts that annual revenues from media in Australia will rise to $29.1 billion in 2016. I’d take that more seriously if I thought BCG actually understood how the different media worked. In quoting that $24 billion figure, it says:
The largest single contribution comes from online content portals such as BigPond, iTunes, and YouTube. Although consumers pay nothing for them directly, these platforms deliver a nationwide benefit valued at more than $9 billion per year.
If we’re not paying anything on iTunes, then all those gift cards were a dumb idea, weren’t they?
As for the torrents: they don’t get mentioned in the report. Presumably if they were, the numbers would be even higher.
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