By making a market in a scarce resource, you can make a profit. With the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and the growth of our consumer economy, the resource scarcity shifteely to be scarce, either. That's the situation with information and services today. They're abundant and cheap. Information on the Web, for example, is plentiful and free.
Software provides another example.
The most popular Web server is not made by Microsoft or Netscape. It's called Apache, and it's created by a loosely knit consortium of programmers, and it's totally free. Free to download, free to use. As resources go, information is not scarce. There is one critical resource, though, that is in chronically short supply.