[OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy

[SteveC]

On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Nic Roets wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
>> Once you have the criteria of what goes in to the measuring pot of the "OSM economy" you further have large error bars on the data for each thing. For example, are those freelancers going to tell you what kind of money they're making?
> 
> It's almost pointless to count actual revenue. The reason why no one
> started a new competitor to NA / TA in the mid-noughties, was that the
> intense competition would reduce revenue making it unprofitable. (Ok
> Google started to compete with NA / TA, but they cleverly combined it
> with other things like streetview).

I disagree. The lack of competition is the sunk capital in creating the map. There's lots of room for a third player, and some people tried. But the cost of mapping the whole US or Europe is large, and the risks high. 


> 
> Most open source / open content projects are a bit like a security
> guard or an external auditor. If all goes well, it will appear to
> casual observers that their only function is to consume oxygen. But
> take them away and you get chaos.
> 
> A better exercise would be to take the page rank of osm.org and
> compare it with the market cap of a website with the same page rank.

Now that's a neat idea.

Steve

stevecoast.com