Re: [OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy
On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 15:05, SteveC wrote: > >> When I see announcements flying around like MapQuests $1M commitment >> to OSM, or CloudMades $12M VC round it begs the question of how big >> is the OSM economy? > > This is somewhat orthogonal to your question, but I think a much > interesting question to ask is what's the overall economic impact of > OpenStreetMap? > > The money that companies like MapQuests and CloudMade are making is > always going to by a tiny fraction of what OpenStreetMap is saving > people who would otherwise not have gotten their job done. This. Stamen is working with OSM data on projects that simply wouldn't exist without it. The cost of entry in money and hassle that a commercial data provider represents makes medium-sized ideas like rendering a city or country's worth of geographic information not worth the bother. With a free data set available, all that energy can go into interesting work that isn't fending off upsells from salespeople. It's basic broken windows, Navteq's holding the rock. I do think it's worth trying to estimate this amount, though. On a side note Ian Dees and I have been kicking back and forth some of the ideas raised in my tiled data service question from the other week. It's relevant here because expanding the ease of OSM data consumption without introducing undue burdens on the server admins will open up data consumption to people who aren't willing to navigate extracts or deal with whole-planet dumps. That in turn will increase the economic impact of OSM by making it an easier data product to use in place of commercial source. Think of Haiti as a lab for this, with a constant flow of prints and garmin exports. City-scale FTW! -mike. michal migurski- m...@stamen.com 415.558.1610 ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 15:05, SteveC wrote: > When I see announcements flying around like MapQuests $1M commitment > to OSM, or CloudMades $12M VC round it begs the question of how big > is the OSM economy? This is somewhat orthogonal to your question, but I think a much interesting question to ask is what's the overall economic impact of OpenStreetMap? The money that companies like MapQuests and CloudMade are making is always going to by a tiny fraction of what OpenStreetMap is saving people who would otherwise not have gotten their job done. The social and economic impact that Wikipedia had was to turn situations where you'd previously have had to ask an expert, buy Britannica, or go to the library. Similarly, how much of the existing market is being displaced by OpenStreetMap, and how much is being created? I bet it's a whole lot more than $20 million. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy
On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Nic Roets wrote: > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC 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 ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, SteveC 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). 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. Or compare the number of tags in our database with the number of tags in the NA / TA databases and their values on the balance sheets of their parents. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy
When I see announcements flying around like MapQuests $1M commitment to OSM, or CloudMades $12M VC round it begs the question of how big is the OSM economy? Purely as an academic exercise it's interesting to think of OSM as an ecosystem around which people find work and provide goods and services. But also perhaps it would be a nice exponential graph to show as a slide along with user growth. We have some limit cases. In 2004 when founded, the economy was approximately zero. Or was it? Do we measure volunteer hours? How about the power and bandwidth the servers are burning? Or is that negligible compared to the other large numbers thrown around? Today I would estimate we have about 5 people freelancing on OSM work worldwide. Perhaps 50 that do OSM work as part of their job, say writing a plugin or using the data. Full-time employees working explicitly on OSM? Perhaps 50 again. These are all guesses with some rough education behind them. These numbers would probably follow the kind of growth curves that various projects around linux did, rather than wikipedia I'm guessing. Because wikipedia was much more about the destruction of value around britannica and others, and the secondary service and otherwise market around wikipedia is pretty small (I think?). Unless you count MediaWiki itself. 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? Still, an interesting thought exercise. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
