Numbers

So,

  When you are dealing in Big Numbers and find them hard to relate to,
the easy way out is to relate them to something smaller. For instance,
if you want to put a price tag on all private wealth in a country, the
interesting number is 4 because it's round about 4 times the GDP. The
German GDP is around 3.2 trillion USD, four times that is 10 trillion
EUR, and that's the usual estimate for german wealth. World GDP is 70
trillion USD, so 280 trillion USD.

Of course this is far into crazy territory, Reuters in 2011, "Global
wealth could rise 50 percent to $345 trillion over the next five years".
That'd be annual growth of 8.4%, while I read in the papers that the
german economy is booming at a growth rate somewhere around 1%. This was
actually based on a Credit Suisse "study", and instead of a 8.4% rise,
"total global household wealth fell by 5.2 percent to 223 trillion US
dollars between mid-2011 and mid-2012". The figure was 231 in 2011;
231 * 108.4% * 108.4% = 271, that's pretty much my 280 estimate above.

In Germany a nice unit is "EUR per capita per month" because with a
population of 82 million, 1 "epcpm", if you will, stands for roughly
one billion EUR,

  82 million * 12 * 1 EUR = 0.984 billion EUR

That allows you to think about big numbers in terms of what you spend
on something per month. If you get your hair cut at a hairdresser's
every other month and pay 10 EUR each time, you spend 5 EUR per month.
Let's assume for a moment that the "you" in this example is represen-
tative of the average, then we could estimate the revenue of all hair-
dressing businesses in germany,

  5 EUR per capita per month = ~ 5 billion EUR per year in Germany

Now http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Nov/0006.html
we actually can simply look up the correct number for this, revenue of
all hairdressing businesses in Germany was at 5.5 billion EUR in 2007.

We can estimate revenues in cinemas like that aswell. If you go to the
cinema, you pay like 7 EUR for a ticket and maybe 3 EUR on a drink or
some popcorn, so let's say 10 EUR per visit, and how often? Well, let's
say every couple months, 3 times a year, if you go at all. Now, not all
people go to the cinema in any given year, too young, too old, too busy,
so let's say only half the population visits the cinema in any year.

So you spend 10 EUR every four months, that's 2.5 EUR per month, and as
half the population, we assume, doesn't go to the cinema at all in the
year, we arrive at 2.5/2 EUR = 1.25 EUR per capita per month, or ~ 1.25
billion EUR in annual revenue for german "Kinos". And the treemap above
agrees, revenue of all Kinos in 2007 was 1.3 billion EUR. Now, with the
Internet it's easy to look these numbers up, the German Federal Film
Board for instance publishes them aswell, or you could buy the "German
Entertainment and Media Outlook" report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Now, the "movie industry" also derives revenue from sale and rental of
videos. Interestingly, the numbers for "revenue from ticket sales" and
"revenue from made-for-cinema video sales" are roughly the same, coming
out at roughly 1 EUR per capita per month each, but let's count the pop-
corn and the non-cinema videos aswell, taking the German Federal Film
Board figure for 2011 for videos,

  Cinema                        1.3 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Videos                        1.6 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Sending SMS messages (2011)   2.8 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Haircuts                      5.5 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Mobile Internet data plans    9.4 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Broadband Internet (wired)   13.6 € per capita (Germany) per month

Looking at revenue figures from the German federal government, article
number 2140810117005, I see that the classification system has been re-
vised since I made the treemap above with Adobe Flex, and the new one
has things from the United Nations ISIC standard. ISIC 6312 for instance
is "Web portals", and we seem to have 341 entities classified thus, so

  Web portals                   0.6 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Web hosting                   1.1 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Web site development          3.0 € per capita (Germany) per month

We can also have a look at our "publishing industry", there we have

  Book publishers               8.9 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Magazine publishers          10.0 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Newspaper publishers         11.5 € per capita (Germany) per month

Right, if you subscribe to a daily newspaper at, say, 1 € per issue the
newspaper publisher "generates" a lot of revenue. But then the newspaper
is probably partially financed by running with

  Advertisement                25.0 € per capita (Germany) per month

We can also have a look at the german federal budget for comparison

  German military              32.3 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Interest on public debt      37.0 € per capita (Germany) per month

Or at individual corporations,

  Google global revenue        38.5 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Microsoft global revenue     56.8 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Volkswagen global revenue   103.9 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Apple global revenue        120.5 € per capita (Germany) per month
  ExxonMobile global revenue  349.0 € per capita (Germany) per month

Screen Digest regularily publishes a report on the World Film production
with "cost" figures. So German film production investments are...

  Germany, Investments 2001     0.5 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Germany, Investments 2002     0.5 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Germany, Investments 2003     0.5 € per capita (Germany) per month

For comparison,

  Spain, Investments 2001       0.2 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Spain, Investments 2002       0.3 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Spain, Investments 2003       0.3 € per capita (Germany) per month
  ...

In the United States annual total gross box office revenue appears to be
around $10 billion, with a population of 311 million that gives us 2.68
USD per capita per month, so at current exchange rates (Google currently
uses 1 EUR : 1.30 USD, has been at 1:1.6 and 1:1.2 recently ...)

  Patent law firms (Germany)    0.9 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Ads for beverages (Germany)   0.9 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Cinema Germany (no popcorn)   0.9 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Cinema Germany (with popcorn) 1.3 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Cinema USA (no popcorn?)      2.0 € per capita (USA) per month

  Revenue of all German Cafés   2.1 € per capita (Germany) per month
  German dentists               4.3 € per capita (Germany) per month

"Total home-entertainment spending in the U.S. inched up 0.23% to $18
billion, according to a report released Tuesday by Digital Entertainment
Group, a trade association", which apparently includes digital which my
earlier number did not, but that's not a huge market in germany at the
moment, so...

  Videos Germany                1.6 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Videos USA                    3.7 € per capita (USA) per month

It would be interesting to have numbers for "made for cinema" only, to
see the numbers match like they do for germany.

"Internet advertising revenues in the United States totaled $10.31
billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, an increase of 12% from the 2012
third quarter total of $9.24 billion and an increase of 15% from the
2012 fourth quarter total $8.97 billion. 2012 full year internet
advertising revenues totaled $36.57 billion, up 15% from the $31.74
billion reported in 2011."

  Global box office revenue     0.3 € per capita (Earth) per month
  Beauty salon revenue Germany  7.0 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Internet advertising USA      7.5 € per capita (USA) per month
  Beauty salon revenue USA      8.3 € per capita (USA) per month
  Google global revenue        10.3 € per capita (USA) per month
  TV advertising USA           12.6 € per capita (USA) per month

"The military budget of the United States during FY 2011 was
approximately $740 billion in expenses for the Department of Defense
(DoD), $141 billion for veteran expenses, and $48 billion in expenses
for the Department of Homeland Security, for a total of $929 billion."

  Interest on public debt USA  51.8 € per capita (USA) per month
  Military USA                191.7 € per capita (USA) per month

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report puts the entire german movie market at
2.6 billion EUR. And the German GDP happens to be 2.6 trillion EUR, so,

  Germany's GDP              2600.0 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Global Box Office revenue    26.0 € per capita (Germany) per month
  Movie Industry in Germany     2.6 € per capita (Germany) per month

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Monday, 13 May 2013 00:25:35 UTC