The behavioral changes induced by the increasingly pervasive presence of the internet in daily life have also involved information search patterns, assigning a constantly growing weight to the advertising investment conveyed by the Net and catalysed by the unchallenged dominators of the internet: Google-YouTube, Microsoft , Yahoo and Facebook.
But the "digital shifting", due to the dominance of the big four, has very concrete repercussions not only in terms of lost revenue for tax agencies all over the world, due to the well-known practice of showing earnings where they are taxed less through of intercompany trading, but also of lack of economic activity and employment.
Studio Ambrosetti calculates how 100 euros invested in the media and advertising sector produce an increase in gross domestic product of 256 euros. By refining the calculation and trying to exclude the effect of stimulating demand generated by banners and videos managed from abroad, the resulting value would be lower but would not fall below 127 euros, the coefficient by which the GDP would increase due to the direct effect alone - that is, referring to the same production chain of the media sector - of the canonical investment of 100 euros.
Even more evident would be the effects on employment. Studio Ambrosetti also determines how one extra employee in the media and advertising sector creates 2,49 employees in the economy as a whole.
This means that Google-YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook, which according to Nielsen data manage to engulf 80% of the online advertising market by taking it away from Italian advertising agencies, have a considerable economic impact on our country, bearing in mind that in Italy the business is worth 1,4 billion euros.
Moreover, the loss increases continuously due to the abandonment of traditional media, to the detriment of which advertising revenues on the web channel increased by 80% between 2008 and 2012.
The intersection between the Internet and globalization makes it possible to set up global advertising campaigns, conceived in Mountain View rather than in Richmond, with minimal installations in the various target countries, therefore without activating a more articulated circuit for the multiplication of income and employment in the recipient countries.
Google, which collects more than one billion euros in Italy, has 120 employees nationwide, Microsoft has 60, Yahoo 90 while Facebook only 15. These structures manage a mass of advertising investments for Italy estimated by experts in just 350 million, leaving 800 in the hands of platforms located abroad.
It would therefore be urgent that publishers, having taken note of digital shifting, were able to adequately oversee the Web, opposing the excessive power of what promises to be the new oligopoly par excellence.
The benefits would be enormous. According to sector analyses, a 10 percent increase in Internet business would produce 200 more jobs, as Maurizio Ricci wrote a few days ago in "Repubblica". And since the Internet is evolving very rapidly, resulting more naturally in the prerogative of young people, half of the new hires would be in the 15-24 age group, the most alienated generation due to the crisis.
