On 3 June 2012 13:52, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)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).