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Numbeo

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Numbeo.com
Type of site
Crowd-sourced online database of cost of living, real property prices, and quality of life statistics
Available inMultilingual
FoundedApril 2009
Country of originSerbia
OwnerNUMBEO DOO Beograd-Palilula
Founder(s)Mladen Adamović
URLwww.numbeo.com
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedApril 2009
Visualisation of Numbeo's 2022 quality of life index by country

Numbeo is a Serbian crowd-sourced online database of perceived consumer prices, real property prices, and quality of life metrics. The website was founded in April 2009 by former Google employee Mladen Adamović,[1][2] to enable users to share and compare information about the cost of living between countries and cities.[3] Since 2012, the website has been operated by NUMBEO DOO Beograd-Palilula, a Serbian private limited company run by Adamović.[4][2][5] According to Adamović, the website earns money through advertising and the sale of subscriptions to its API.[6]

Numbeo's crowd-sourced data can be inserted or altered by anyone accessing the website, and is not peer-reviewed.[7][8][9] Data is also manually gathered by the operator, from sources such as company and governmental websites,[10][11][12] which is done in half-year intervals;[13] it is then combined with user-generated data by giving it extra weight in the final score calculation, according to the company.[14] As of 2017, it was the largest database of user generated data about cities in the world.[15] As of 2020, this possibly applied to (user generated) data on housing prices as well.[16] The quality of life index is a combination of eight sub-indexes: purchasing power, safety, healthcare, cost of living, property price to income ratio, traffic commute time, pollution, and climate.[17][18]

The website's "Crime Index", intended to serve as an overall crime level estimate, is compiled from answers to user surveys, which have been processed by a Java-programmed backend to produce country- or city-level ratings on a 100-point scale, with higher values indicating worse crime. There is also a "Safety Index", with higher scores indicating a safer city.[19] Numbeo's data points on crime have been criticized by academics[20] and by the media as unreliable and, at times, misleading.

  • In 2017, a Swedish man manipulated the crime stats of the Lund, Sweden by repeatedly submitting negative ratings in this category, at a time when the relevant data set was very small. In less than a day, he succeeded in making it show up as the most dangerous city in the world on the website's "Crime Index Rate" page. He commented: "Numbeo should hardly be considered stats, it’s more like reviews. Anyone, anywhere in the world can change the data, as many times as they want. Completely anonymously."[21]
  • In 2022, a Numbeo claim that Bradford, England was "Europe's most dangerous city" went viral on social media and was reported on in British press.[22][23] Another English city, Coventry, was ranked second in this statistic, which was disputed by a local newspaper journalist—citing higher official crime rates in various other English cities/counties.[24]
  • In 2022, David Weinberger expressed criticism of the site's methodology of measuring crime rate, saying: "It is misleading to claim to have derived from this a representation of the highest-crime rate cities: what is presented are cities which are perceived as those with the most crime, by a certain number of Internet users. But for studies in the social sciences, this approach is worthless." The crime and security indices' measurements are derived from answers to a 15-point questionnaire. Experts responding to AFP's fact-checkers' inquiries regarding reliability of Numbeo's crime stats contended that this does not make for a methodologically valid victimization survey, due to non-representative sampling, and that—especially with respect to cross-country comparisons which are considered effectively impossible to validly construct (except for certain crimes that may be experienced the same way across communities, such as car theft)—the site's information is false.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Cost of Living Information Website, Numbeo.com, Announces New Software Release which Contains Information for More than 300 Cities". PRWeb (Press release). Cision Ltd. Retrieved 19 May 2023.
  2. ^ a b "Cene nekretnina u Beogradu u vrhu liste evropskih gradova" [Real estate prices in Belgrade top the list of European cities]. Radio Television of Serbia. Tanjug. 28 March 2021. Retrieved 19 May 2023.
  3. ^ "Sources for cost of livings reports and comparisons". ICAEW. London: The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Archived from the original on 18 September 2019.
  4. ^ "Претрага привредних друштава" [Company search]. Business Registers Agency (Serbia) (in Serbian). 20853514. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  5. ^ "About This Website - Numbeo.com". www.numbeo.com.
  6. ^ Adamović, Mladen. "How does Numbeo.com make money? How successful is it?". Quora. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  7. ^ Iacobucci, Dawn (17 September 2020). Continuing to Broaden the Marketing Concept. Emerald Group Publishing. p. 253. ISBN 978-1-78754-824-4.
  8. ^ Guzman, Martin (28 August 2018). Toward a Just Society: Joseph Stiglitz and Twenty-First Century Economics. Columbia University Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-231-54680-5.
  9. ^ Walsh, Alistair (29 August 2012). "Harare has poor healthcare and political violence, but property is relatively inexpensive". propertyobserver.com.au. Archived from the original on 18 September 2017. Serbian-run website Numbeo lists the inner-city apartment prices in Harare at $1,000 a square metre. The numbers are based on user contributed figures and should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.
  10. ^ Fox, David (28 January 2022). "Bermuda trails most countries in purchasing power". The Royal Gazette. Retrieved 3 June 2023. Numbeo also uses links to government websites, supermarket and restaurant sites with prices and other relevant sources, together with publicly available links to pricing for taxi and bus services.
  11. ^ Sibthorpe, Clare (22 July 2016). "Canberra home to the highest quality of living worldwide, according to Numbeo data". The Age. Retrieved 3 June 2023. Numbeo gathers statistics from a range of sources, such as websites of supermarkets, taxi company websites, governmental institutions, newspaper articles and other surveys.
  12. ^ Anthony, John (19 January 2018). "Hamilton's cost of living more expensive than Auckland, international index says". Stuff. Retrieved 2 June 2023. Numbeo says it manually collects data from "authoritative sources".
  13. ^ Ghazanchyan, Siranush (17 January 2020). "Yerevan named among world's most expensive cities". Public Radio of Armenia. Retrieved 3 June 2023.
  14. ^ "Methodology and Motivation". www.numbeo.com. Retrieved 2 June 2023. Numbeo's data collection process involves a combination of user-generated input and manually gathered information from reputable sources such as supermarket and taxi company websites, and governmental institutions. The manually collected data from each source are entered twice yearly and given a weight that is three times higher than user-generated input to improve the reliability of the data.
  15. ^ Yilmazkuday, Demet; Yilmazkuday, Hakan (2017). "The role of direct flights in trade costs". Review of World Economics. 153 (2): 255. doi:10.1007/s10290-016-0263-z. ISSN 1610-2878. JSTOR 26748568. S2CID 254166486.
  16. ^ Aizawa, Toshiaki; Helble, Matthias; Lee, Kwan Ok (2020). "Housing Inequality in Developing Asia and the United States: Will Common Problems Mean Common Solutions?". Cityscape. 22 (2): 33. ISSN 1936-007X. JSTOR 26926892.
  17. ^ Martin, Will (5 May 2017). "The 26 major cities with the highest quality of life in the world". Business Insider. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  18. ^ Graff, Amy (20 May 2019). "San Francisco now has the highest salaries in the world". SFGATE. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  19. ^ Orii, Lisa; Alonso, Luis; Larson, Kent (13 November 2020). "Methodology for Establishing Well-Being Urban Indicators at the District Level to be Used on the CityScope Platform". Sustainability. 12 (22): 9458. doi:10.3390/su12229458. ISSN 2071-1050.
  20. ^ a b Claire-Line Nass (17 May 2022). "Attention à ce classement des "villes les plus criminelles d'Europe" dominé par des métropoles françaises" [Beware of this ranking of "Europe's highest crime rate cities" dominated by French metropolises]. Factuel (Agence France-Presse) (in French).
  21. ^ Lee, Rodsen (17 January 2017). "How one Swede made a city the world's 'most dangerous' to expose fake stats". thelocal.se. Retrieved 7 February 2022.
  22. ^ Meek, Natasha (19 August 2022). "Bradford is Europe's 'most dangerous' city? Police force slams viral claim". Telegraph & Argus. Retrieved 23 September 2022.
  23. ^ Mwitumwa, Monde (20 August 2022). "Yorkshire city is 'most dangerous in Europe' and police boss is furious". YorkshireLive. Retrieved 23 September 2022.
  24. ^ Thompson, Danny (24 August 2022). "Is Coventry really the second-most dangerous city in Europe?". Coventry Telegraph. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
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