Ad Group Says Internet Accounts For 5.1M US Jobs, 3.7% of GDP 73
lpress writes "A Harvard Business School study sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that the ad-supported Internet is responsible for 5.1 million jobs in the U.S. — two million direct and 3.1 million indirect. They report that the Internet accounted for 3.7% of 2011 GDP. The research, development and procurement that launched the Internet back in the 1970s and 1980s cost the US taxpayers $124.5 million at the time — not a bad investment!" Your calculations may vary.
Much larger than the movie and music industries (Score:5, Insightful)
So the employment is much larger than the movie and music industries.
And the video game industry is also larger than movies and music.
Why is the tail always doing the barking for the dog again?
This is sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Ad-supported internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
how much have you paid to slashdot today?
Slashdot is well known and popular because of its users -- people come here to read comments and have discussions, to the point where they need to be reminded to read the articles. Slashdot does not need to pay people to write things, moderate, etc. This is an online community, not some curated experience.
slashdot requires 16 web servers, 7 db servers, 2 db read-only servers, 2 load balancers, and 3 misc systems.
I manage that many computers in my spare time, and unlike the systems I voluntarily deal with, Slashdot only needs a handful of applications to work (you might even say Slashdot only needs one application to work, but I suspect this is divided into several parts). Slashdot has a high load to deal with, but you are not talking about users running arbitrary applications.
If anything, I would say that Slashdot-style websites would be the winners if everyone installed ABP. Websites where the only operating costs are keeping a handful of servers online are websites whose costs can be covered by other means if necessary -- micropayments, merchandising, etc. If that is impossible, then the web needs to start being decentralized, users participating in serving the websites they visit (a P2P revival, built right into your browser).
So yeah, the users support Slashdot, because if we were not commenting on articles and arguing with each other then nobody would visit Slashdot.