 | |
Type of site | Crowd-sourced online database of cost of living, real property prices, and quality of life statistics |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | April 2009 |
| Country of origin | Serbia |
| Owner | NUMBEO DOO Beograd-Palilula |
| Founder(s) | Mladen Adamović |
| URL | www |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | April 2009 |
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Numbeo's crowd-sourced data can be inserted or altered by anyone accessing the website, and is not peer-reviewed.[7][8][9] Data is also manually gathered by the operator, from sources such as company and governmental websites,[10][11][12] which is done in half-year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.
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.
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.
Numbeo gathers statistics from a range of sources, such as websites of supermarkets, taxi company websites, governmental institutions, newspaper articles and other surveys.
Numbeo says it manually collects data from "authoritative sources".
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.
