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Comment by dejb | Hacker News Reader

>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think he messed the maths up

1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article)

Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours

1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's

Correct me if I'm wrong.

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>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.

Yes I agree it is useful to consider the rest of the world. However that was not the cause for the discrepancy and the numbers are still out by a factor of 100. If you think that 1% of global surplus attention could annually create 10000 wikipedias instead of 100 then you are likely to reach some very different conclusions. Maybe he switched context from 1% to 100% - that would make sense.

You're completely right. To convince myself:

  trillion = 10**12
  wikipedia = 10**8

  surplus = trillion
  applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01
  print applied_surplus / wikipedia

which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.

Wikipedia = 100 million hours

Annual TV in US = 200 billion hours

Time watching Ads in US, per weekend = 100 million hours

Annual TV worldwide = 1 trillion hours

Yes and 1% of 1 trillion is 10 billion which is the equivalent of 100 Wikipedias - NOT the 10,000 Wikipedias he was proposing.

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