Jans Hammer wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2019 7:29 am
Research has shown that American consumers value @Wikipedia at about $42 billion...
"Research," in this case, consists of
a single article in the Harvard Business Review claiming that "the median value that U.S. consumers place on Wikipedia is about $150 a year." They're not saying how they chose their sample (my guess would be Harvard students, or worse, Harvard
graduates), but they do at least admit that the number is based on how much respondents
say they would pay, "validated" by choosing a few respondents at random, actually having them avoid the site for a month or two, and paying them that amount. Anyway, based on this, they're taking a population of 280 million US consumers (a dodgy number in itself) and simply multiplying by 150 to get Wikipedia's "consumer surplus value."
Obviously, anyone who has ever tried to get large numbers of people to actually pay for non-specialized static web content of
any kind (aside from pornography, maybe) will tell you this is an absurd methodology. You might be able to get a large number of people to shell out some money for access to Wikipedia
if there was no free alternative, but of course someone will always come out with a free alternative. And in any event, that number isn't likely to be all that close to 280 thousand, much less 280 million.
It might be more accurate to say that people would pay something for access to reference information
in general, because (from their perspective at least) they already do in the form of ISP internet access fees. But we'll never really know how many or how much people would be willing to pay for "encyclopedia access," because Wikipedia exists.
I guess the WMF realizes that too, so they figure they can get away with saying whatever ridiculous thing(s) they want on the subject.
