You’ve probably heard it a thousand times already, attention is becoming the most valuable resource of our time. It’s not information that valuable anymore, Google and the gang solved this. Knowledge is. And attention. There is so much going on daily that 5 minutes of my time are suddenly outrageously expensive.
Taking a look at what you’ve produced, in the form of a post, tweet, Facebook update, the project you’ve moonlighted on for the past 4 months, email and so on, requires that I spend some of my precious attention and time on you, instead of looking at some cat playing a piano, reading the latest news or actually doing some work.
All of this makes one simple click extremely valuable. Pressing like on the post somebody has just written sends the message that you took the time to actually read it and appreciate it. One click, one like, +1, share, Digg, has become important and valuable.
What ever happened to hand writing a post-card and sending it via email? Just thinking of how much time, effort and attention this required makes me shiver. Now it takes just a tweet + a picture. I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear, hey, send us a tweet from your vacation. Actually, I think I’ve already heard it…
It’s amazing how much a simple click is beginning to be worth and how invaluable is becoming taking the time to write a personal message or having a genuine face to face human interaction.
The web was built as a way for scientists to communicate and not for running ads. However John Quelch hits the bulls eye by pointing out in this Harvard Business School article that the top most common activities on the web (searching for information, reading news, paying bills, watching a video, researching a product) are in one way or the other supported by advertising. And it’s hard, if not impossible, to argue against this.
So the question is – how much money is the web worth? I came across a few attempts of quantifying the web
Quelch mentions 3 in his article (the values are for the U.S. per year):
1. Employment value – look at how many work with something that has to do with the web =>$300 billion
2. Payment value – value of payments made across the web => $444 billion
3. Time Value – how much the time spent on the net is worth => $680 billion
Another interesting idea was that of Kevin Kelly who made an estimation of how much it costed to build the web as it is today. He made a calculation starting from the number of pages indexed by Google – 1 trillion and estimated that for every page a certain amount of programming and content creation is needed. The result is number 4 on our list
4. Take into account all the work from the last 6000 days, which is the rough age of the web, for the creation of the Internet as we know it => 1 trillion pages => ~ $5 trillion.
Yet a wilder estimation was made by Jason Kottke from Kottke.com who calculated the value of a tiny portion of the web, which is Facebook, in burgers, starting from a Burger King campaign. Read the details here. The result is number 5 on our list.
5. Value of Facebook = $12/user X 150M users = $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook.
That’s what I’ve come across until now, do YOU have anything else to add to the list?
Sources:
1. Quantifying the Economic Impact of the Internet – by John Quelch (via @octavdruta)
2. Facebook’s valuation (in Whoppers) – by Jason Kottke
3. A Trillion Hours – by Kevin Kelley
4. How big is the free economy? – by Chris Anderson
5. FREE notes (see chapter 10) – by Chris Anderson
