Cost of free open-access medical education (FOAM): An economic analysis of the top 20 FOAM sites.

Background: Free open-access medical education (FOAM) is a growing resource within the field of medicine, in particular, emergency medicine. Yet despite FOAM's contribution to advancing medical education, the precise value of FOAM has never been calculated. As a result, content creators have not been acknowledged, either financially or academically, for their deliverables. The aim of this paper was to meet this challenge by determining a value for the top 20 FOAM sites as determined by web traffic in emergency medicine through two approaches. The first approach was to value the websites through a market-based method, where the value of the website was extrapolated from the number of blog posts published. The second approach was through a traffic analysis for each website.

Methods: The top 20 FOAM websites in emergency medicine were identified and the monetary value of each resource was calculated through two methods, the first by extrapolating the number of blog posts published by each resource and the second through traffic analysis conducted by a third-party industry specialist based on the number of unique visitors and page visits.

Results: The median page views per month was 194,850 and the median number of unique visitors was 138,350. Based on the content valuation method, the median value of content produced in a year was $2337.06 per website. Through the traffic valuation method, the median overall value of a website was $22,815.

Conclusions: Although two different approaches were used to value FOAM, both came to the same conclusion that there is substantial economic value being produced. This value should not go unrewarded and content creators should be acknowledged either academically or financially for their contributions.