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Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?

Posted by Cliff on from the inflation-ain't-got-nothing-on-this dept.

Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"

7 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Brand Naming by alphaseven · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My guess for most bucks for the bit would be in the field of Brand Naming. Companies pay naming firms tens of thousands of dollars to come up with new words like "Lucent", "Pentium" and "Infiniti".

    This article, The Name Game cites these firms charging around $75,000 for a single word that may only be seven letters long. Not a logo, not an ad campaign, not even a domain registration, just the single word. I guess this runs roughly around $10,000 per byte.

    1. Re:Brand Naming by squaretorus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yep. This is the answer.

      Nike
      Coke
      McDonalds

      You could burn every single physical asset of these companies. Kill all the staff. And you would still only have dented the market value of the company - these companies are brand led. (ISBN 0-00-653040-0 for lots of juice).

      It's the word 'NIKE' and the tick logo that ALL the value resides in - because people associate THOSE with the Nike values. You don't need the big marketing plan, brand bible etc... for that - all of those can be reworked. Whats of value is the existing brand loyalty and awareness.

  2. divide by Afghanistan by at10u8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The US Department of Defense paid untold millions for zero bytes, which means there is a divide by zero error in this hypothesis. Recall that when the war on terror began the DOD bought all the time that Ikonos was over Afghanistan. This was effectively to ensure that it produced zero bytes of information.

  3. Goats on Venus? by leonbrooks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.

    They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.

    Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.

    I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.

    --
    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
  4. Re:Headlines. by ender81b · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interesting question. Ok, here we go - a test of my history abilities. I am calculating from united states and soviet union only, not factoring UK/Canada/Austrila, etc, etc. Not to offend anybody or in anyway diminish there contribution but this I don't wnat this to turn into an all day project.

    United States

    10% (avg) of GDP from 1941-42
    37% of GDP from 1942-1945 (avg)
    GDP(in billions) 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
    113.5 144.2 180.0 209.0 221.1
    Defense Spending: 11.4 53.4 66.0 77.3 81.8

    Total Defense: $289.6 Billion (note: roughly 1/3 of this went to the pacific theatre)
    Casulties: 292 000 dead (estimating cost of lives is NOT something I am going to do)

    Soviet Union

    Casulties: 13.6 million armed forces, 7.7 million civilian dead (note: roughly 1/2 of those who entered service in soviet military where either killed or wounded. Estimate the cost of that!)

    Note: No official records of cost of WWII to Soviet Union have ever been released (that I know of or could find). Estimates are on the order of $350 billion counting damage to infrastructure, etc.

    Soviet Union (350) + US (191.1) cost: $541.1 billion. unadjusted for inflation

    "We Win" = 48 bits of ASCII code. Each Bit = 11.27$ billion dollars. Rough adjustment for Australia,NZ,Britain,Canada,etc = 13.45 billion dollars/bit unadjusted for inflation

    Not taking into account casulties, thousands of other unknown/unquantifiable factors.

    Sources:
    A war to be Won - Murray and Millet
    The World At Arms - Reader's Digest (publisher
    Us Gov't GDP - IRS website

  5. Re:enigma by debrain · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You make good points. I followed "valuable" by "invaluable" perhaps more for assonance than semantics.

    Neil Stephenson makes good light of your first point in Cryptonomicon (ie. detachment 2703+1), and certainly your second is adamantly indicated by Sun Tzu's fundamentals. Who am I to disagree? ;)

    However, I would hazard that one could permit the definition of invaluable (valuable beyond estimation) for Enigma insofar as it provided options to the Allies that would not have otherwise been available. I am not qualified to answer that authoritatively, but certainly Stephenson's fictional history indicates this to be permissible, if not appropriate.

  6. setuid bit by bentini · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If we believe all those estimates about how much hackers cost people...

    Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.