On 3 June 2012 13:52, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com wrote:
An alternative methodology would be to account for the value that would be required to replace Wikipedia if it didn't exist. As an example of this methodology you could take the traded price of a Wikipedia substitute (e.g. Britannica Online is £50 a year) and multiply that by the number of users, which I'd estimate at 30 million in the UK. So the hidden value to the UK economy of Wikipedia could be as high as £1.5 billion every year....
The problem with that kind of approach is that you are equating price and value. When a sale takes place, it happens at a price somewhere between the value to the buyer and the value to the seller (although the value to the seller is a little difficult to define for something like an online subscription where the unit cost is essentially zero). That means the value of a Britannica subscription for those that buy one is actually more than £50 (otherwise they wouldn't have bought it - they would have been at least as happy just keeping the £50). However, for those that don't buy one (and, even if Wikipedia vanished, most of our readers wouldn't buy one), the value is less than £50 (that's why they don't buy it).