Not intangibles in general but websites in particular make it very difficult. I think there's just not detailed enough reporting available to associate revenue

Not intangibles in general but websites in particular make it very difficult. I think there's just not detailed enough reporting available to associate revenue and costs. And if you would create much more extensive reporting frameworks you would likely put a huge burden on small companies. Let's take the facebook news feed as an example. Loading just the page might cause requests from CDNs in three different countries. Then the frontend might have been written in the UK and the backend in the US. The ads manager for the ad you just clicked worked in Germany. I doubt any modern IT company can track expenses on that level of detail. And associating costs with revenues is non-trivial either: Did the front end contribute to the revenue generated with the ad click? Did the backend or just the work of the ads manager in Germany? There's so much leeway for companies right now. IT companies like Google and Facebook have one single product (ads) that generates most of their revenues. The country where the revenue occurred can be easily established (eg. an ad sold to a German company). But the costs to create this product (the whole platform) have been accrued all over the world. Without intimate knowledge of the corporate structure and the technical setup companies can basically tell you any story about where these costs were incurred.