How Do You Measure the Value of Something That Has No Price?

Global end user spending on communications services (voice and data, not entertainment video) runs about $1.8 trillion a year or so, one can extrapolate from the most-recent International Telecommunicatons Union statistics.

Fixed line voice probably sits at about the $740 billion range in 2009.

Infonetics Research says VoIP services bring in $21 billion for service providers in the first half, so assume an annual total of $42 billion. Assume 16 percent of those revenues are for trunking services of one sort or another and voice revenues might hit $35 billion or so for the full year.

That suggests VoIP services represent about 4.7 percent of total global voice revenues in 2009.

The point is that VoIP remains a relatively small portion of global voice revenues. But the situation is more complicated than simply how VoIP stacks up as a revenue driver. The larger problem with voice revenues, as everyone agrees, is that it is trending towards becoming an "application," not a service. That means it will sometimes be provided "at no incremental cost," or at "very low incremental cost."

The value VoIP represents cannot be strictly measured using "revenue" metrics, anymore than the value of email or instant messaging or presence can be measured by revenue metrics. Probably all that anyone can say with some assurance is that the value VoIP represents is greater than five percent of the total value of voice communications, as many sessions occur on a "non-charged" basis.

Many years ago, consumers got access to email in one of two ways. They got email access from their employers, or they bought dial-up Internet access and got their email from their ISPs. In neither case has it, or is, possible to calculate the economic value of email, as the measurable "product" for a consumer was the value of the dial-up Internet connection.

Business value is even harder to calculate, as organizations can buy software and hardware to host their own email, and then buy access connections that support any number of applications, without any specific fee required to host email services.

The larger point is that, in future years, the service revenue attributable directly to voice services will be a number that might remain flat, might grow or might shrink. If voice revenues ultimately shrink, as they might in many markets, or if VoIP replaces TDM versions of voice, that will not necessarily mean that people are talking less, or that the value ascribed to voice is less.

It simply will mean that the value is only indirectly measurable. Only one thing can be said for sure. Markets whose products cannot be directly measured will not be measured. The first sign of this is the increasing use of metrics such as "revenue generating units" or "services per customer" or "average revenue per user."

At some point, though it might still be a measurable quantity, the value of voice services will be only partially represented by "service" revenue. It's tough to measure the value of something that has no specific "incremental cost."

So what will market researchers and agencies do? What they have done before: they will measure the value of some associated product that does have a market price. They will measure the value of purchased access connections, rather than particular applications, much as one could measure ISP access subscriptions, but not the value of email.