What’s the difference between a digital product and information goods?
A digital product is any good or service delivered in digital form (like software, apps, ebooks, or streaming media), while an information good is a type of good whose core value is the information or content it contains (like data, knowledge, or symbolic content).
In practice, information goods can be delivered either physically (e.g., a printed book) or digitally (e.g., a PDF), so a digital product is about the form, whereas an information good is about the nature of the value.
Core conceptual difference
Digital product:
- Defined by its mode of delivery and use: it exists and is consumed in digital form (software, online course platform, SaaS UI, game, etc.).
- May or may not primarily embody “information” as content; for example, a CAD tool or a photo-editing app is a digital product but not purely an information good.
Information good:
- Defined by what is being sold: information, knowledge, or symbolic content (text, audio, video, data).
- Can be instantiated both physically (DVD, book) and digitally (stream, download); the economic properties hinge on the information being non-rival and easily copied, not on the carrier.
Economic and design implications
Economics:
- Information goods are characterized by high fixed costs of creation and near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, with strong non-rivalry and potential non-excludability (easy copying, piracy).
- Digital products share low marginal cost of replication, but many add constraints and service layers (licensing, access control, subscriptions) that change pricing and usage economics beyond “pure” information-goods logic.
Product/UX perspective:
- When thinking about a digital product, attention goes to journeys, features, interactions, and ongoing updates.
- When thinking about an information good, attention goes to content quality, intellectual property, and pricing/versioning of the information itself.
How they overlap
Many things are both:
- An ebook, a streaming film, or a downloadable dataset are digital products that are also information goods, because they are digital in form and informational in value.
But not all:
- A printed reference book is an information good but not a digital product.A purely functional cloud API for compute (e.g., GPU time with minimal content) is a digital product but only weakly an information good, because the primary value is computation or capability, not information content.