Alphax wrote:
Well, as of July 2005, all of the different language editions of
Wikipedia came to 491 M words: it must be _considerably_
greater than
that now. At a journalist's rate of $1/word,
that would
make Wikipedia
worth in excess of $500,000,000.
-- Neil
They get about 50 billion hits a year, right? So at $2 CPM
that's $100 million a year, and at a P/E of 20 that's $2
billion. Of course, that's more than just the value of the
content, and it ignores the expenses to run the site, which
isn't much compared to $100 million a year.
It's too bad non-profits can't IPO. :)
I think you've over-rated the value of Wikipedia articles. Our
article on the [[Atom]] (you know, what chemical elements are
made of?) is a case in point.
I would pay a writer $1.00 per word for Britannica's 60-word
intro ($60) sooner than I'd pay the same rate for Wikipedia's
2,000 word article. Ours is not worth $2,000.
If I had to hire a professional writer to fix up [[atom]], I
would have to pay between $100 and $200. That would amount to
5 cents to 10 cents per word.
We like to boast of our quality, but in this case our boast
would be false.
Uncle Ed Poor
Self-proclaimed Quality Czar
Wikipedia Research Team