On 3 June 2012 13:52, Chris Keating <[email protected]> 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). _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
