[Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Thomas Dalton]

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