Estimating Value of e-Xtension Grape Community of Practice Spanish-translated Articles

Many vineyard workers throughout the United States do not speak English as a first language. Information translated into Spanish can help many of those workers better understand concepts that relate directly to their job performance.  In 2010, the eXtension Grape Community of Practice began the task of translating articles into Spanish to extend information to an underserved portion of their community of interest.  To date over 100 articles have been translated into Spanish.  Google Analytics data revealed that in some cases, the Spanish versions receive more unique page views and have longer reading times than the English version.  South American Spanish-speaking countries and others such as Mexico and Spain have been frequent readers of the online articles.  Assessing impact of these interactions is difficult; however, using economic models such as estimated time allocation (investment) or opportunity cost could help assign a monetary value to each page view.  The top three Spanish articles were paired with their English counterparts for analysis.  Average household net-adjusted disposable income data was obtained from OECD.org to calculate the opportunity cost.  We assumed in this case that the information was used for work and that hours worked were flexible, allowing for use of hourly wage as a model input.  Leisure time, valued at ¼ of work time, was also used as a comparison.  This data coupled with “unique page views” and “time spent on page” from Google Analytics (December 2010 to March 2013) resulted in values being derived for all six articles.  The top Spanish article [(Partes de la planta de uva: Brotes (Parts of the Grapevine: Shoots)] had an opportunity cost of between $1332 to $5,326, besting the English version ($787 to $3,149).  The other two articles [(Injerto de las Plantas de Uva (Grafting Grape Vines); Partes de la Vid: Flores y Frutos (Parts of the Grapevine: Flowers and Fruits)] had opportunity cost of between $429 to $1,717 and $259 to $1,034, respectively, each of which were less than the English version of the article.  Although it presents an incomplete picture of the impact of the article, deriving the opportunity cost allows authors of online articles to see how readers value their time and the investment they are willing to make to read online information.