21181 Membership fees
12924 *Royalties received from members selling ISO standards*
6592 *Revenue – net sales*
2286 Funding of capacity building projects
273 Funding of ISO strategic projects
(99) Financial revenue (loss)
=====
43157 TOTAL REVENUE
Ideally standards should be free, but how the organisation could survive on only half its current revenues would need to be addressed.
Edit: removed subtotal rows “34105 Revenue from members”, “2559 Funding of ISO projects”
How they should survive? e.g. by 20 governments realizing that the friction this bullshit adds is costing their country more than 1 million, and each contributing 1M of tax money.
Or begging for donations. Maybe Wikimedia Foundation would be willing to chip in?
You aren't going to pay $100 per standard to access it. Would you pay $1/year for unlimited access to all ISO standards?
So maybe the government should charge you $0.02 more in taxes for this, plus another $0.98 for 49 other things that you don't care about, and make this a public good.
So ISO has 165 member countries, if each one would pays 80k per year more than the current membership fee, that would cover the lost revenue from sales. That seems almost like a rounding error to me.
You need to think it through further. Where do the member bodies get this money from?
No, they aren't all taxpayer funded. In some countries they are entirely private organizations. ANSI is a non-profit private company, for example. And the ones that are are taxpayer funded are not necessarily wholly so. The BSI gets grants from the U.K. government, for example, but is far from wholly funded by it.
Standards Australia made just under AUD7 millions in 2017 (for example) from selling copies of standards, via subcontractor publisher SAI. This was just under a quarter of its total revenue for the year. Nearly all that would be gone were ISO to start giving away copies for free, and yet SA would be expected to pay an extra AUD0.1 million in ISO fees at the same time.
I suspect most of the operations costs come from doing things in their obsolete way.
If you eliminated the paywall, there'd be no reason to run a paywall, which imposes substantial costs. A lot of their costs are for printing paper, but one of the main draws for paper is that they lock down the PDFs with onerous licensing restrictions so the paper is often far more efficient from a legal perspective. If they just posted everything as a PDF on a website, they could hide behind a CDN and much of their operations costs would disappear.
I couldn't find specific numbers for how much that would save. But I suspect the majority of their costs - probably 90% or more - would be eliminated if they eliminated the paywall.
Come on, we are talking about $20 million! I don’t think half their staff are dedicated to billing and website design related to the sale of ISO standards.
Also sister comment mentions that member organisations make a profit from them too, so the revenue lost is greater and member organisations would lose revenue, not just the ISO.
> A lot of their costs are for printing paper, but one of the main draws for paper is that they lock down the PDFs with onerous licensing restrictions so the paper is often far more efficient from a legal perspective.
The reason to publish paper is primarily because of the paywall. Oasis does not bother, nor does the ietf.
If ISO eliminated billing and stopped publishing paper then I would be unsurprised if most of their costs disappeared.
2019 revenue of ISO - figures in ‘000s of CHF (edit 1CHF = 1.08USD) - details from page 63 of https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/P...
Ideally standards should be free, but how the organisation could survive on only half its current revenues would need to be addressed.Edit: removed subtotal rows “34105 Revenue from members”, “2559 Funding of ISO projects”