Cognitive Surplus is mostly a guided instructional tour on the potential of what could happen if 99% of TV watching didn’t change. The entire of wikipedia has taken the cognitive load that is spent in the US, in one weekend, watching adverts on TV (roughly 20% of airtime). If 99% of TV doesn’t change, then 1% does; that is 10 wikipedia sized projects per year.

The US TV Advertising budget in 2008 was $69 billion (source) which rougly equates to the equivalent of wikipedia being built in $379 million of advertising time. A google search suggests wikipedia had a financial worth in 2006 of around $580 million. Which makes it a really good deal for society on average, especially for what is one weekends spent using time that wasn’t in productive use – the adverts will be the same the following weekend.

Given the difference in years in the figures, the $200 million “profit” to the world from the US working on wikipedia for a weekend will certainly be a low figure, but it’s still a pretty good outcome for a single weekend’s effort, and excludes a huge number of externalities (going both ways). While you will never get 100% of any nation to do anything for 20% of a weekend, you’ll also have never everyone who does participate go back to normal afterwards either.

I wonder what the equivalent figures turn out to be for the UK (the lack of adverts on the BBC make this harder), and what implications that has for the (probably abandoned) Tory plan for a £1m prize for better policy engagement process, given the lessons from Apps for America on this.