The idea is to create a "Wikipedia for statistics", pulling a ton of statistics about everything and putting them in one place where they're easily searchable and filtered by tags/keywords. Content would be spidered as well as user-submitted, with sources needed to guarantee accuracy.<p>Is this a good idea? Who would be the main users? How could it be monetized? It seems like a pretty obvious product so the lack of existing alternatives concerns me.<p>I appreciate the input from the HN community!
There are already several stats sites , especially for economics. I recall using those sites when I was in B-School.<p>Now, <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/</a> is my go to site for all my stats related searches.<p>You should talk to B-School students and find out what they need to change their search habits.
I like the idea - I myself run into lots of times where I am looking for random statistics that I need for a presentation, report, etc. Few things to consider:<p>- I like a freemium/subscription model. Even if the freemium model only allows the user to find such statistic. Ex show the user "X% of mobile users use their phone in the bathroom".<p>- I'm more worried from a profitability standpoint. Can you procure licenses for the data (remember that if you just buy the report, you don't have the license to sell it again) and still turn a profit?<p>- Maybe you can follow a more affiliate model. Often times, I find it difficult to just find which reports can give me the data I need. Perhaps some sort of indexing service for reports - ala Google Book/Scholar search.<p>Good luck!
Our initial thought was to focus on consumer demographic statistics for small/med size companies to use when evaluating consumer habits and trends. Currently, that information is all over the place in different reports costing up to $5K a piece. We were thinking about a freemium/subscription model and open the market to businesses that don't necessarily want to spend $5K on one report; statistics like "29% of college students in the U.S. own smartphones".<p>Wolfram Alpha is more of a computational search engine than a stat search engine, so IMO the overlap is minimal.<p>Good idea to talk to B-School students; that's definitely a segment of the market that might be interested in something like this.