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

[Erik Zachte]

I doubt most subscribers to Britannica Online access it almost every day, at home and at work, for even most mundane information needs. 
Wikipedia is much more filled with practical information that helps us save time and avoid costly mistakes every day. 
Is Britannica Online comparable in content to the paper edition? Ask any owner of that paper edition how often they grabbed a volume from the shelf, even before Wikipedia came along.
Mainly for this reason I doubt people would mass subscribe to Britannica when Wikipedia disappeared.

Given that Google and other search engines serve our pages often in the top 5 results, we might perhaps derive our economic value from their gross profit (would 5% be a conservative enough wild guess)? 
Google's gross profit is about $26 billion per year [1]. 5% added value would equal $1.3 billion per year and that is only the Google part, and they are involved in 45% of our external requests [2].

(still this leaves Thomas argument that money spent does not equal financial gain) 

At first Wikimania, at Frankfurt, Jimmy gave an estimate how much money we could have earned from advertisements, and it was already more than a million per month in 2005.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gross+profit+google
[2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportGoogle.htm

Erik Zachte

-----Original Message-----
From: wikimedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2012 3:08 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

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).

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