The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, announced a $3 million donation from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today. The donation will be paid ratably over three years.
Last year the foundation had total income of $2.7 million and expenses of about $2.1 million (see financials here). This year revenue should be significantly higher. In addition to this donation, Wikipedia has engaged in significant fundraising efforts over the last year. The foundation has 15 employees and hopes to grow to 25 by 2010.
The foundation has also been under close scrutiny lately around potential conflicts with large donors. at some point, it seems, they should seriously consider proposals to become financially independent via advertising on the site. Even very minor advertising would provide a huge windfall. Nearly a quarter of a billion people visit Wikipedia every month (fifth largest on the Internet), generating nearly 4 billion page views (Comscore worldwide, February 2008).
$3m for the sum of all human knowledge… that sounds cheap…
I just put the entire universe of existence on an excel spreadsheet. Submit your bids to take a peak. Only history knows this is a genuine leak.
Wikipedia should show ads and give a large part of the profit to charity. That would really make a change, instead of relying on donations.
oh yeah, right … as if ads would preclude potential conflicts of interests ….
what are you Michael ? a first grader in economics ?
!Warning: Idealism ahead!
I really don’t agree with the call for ad financing. Wikipedia already has to fight the battle of neutrality hard enough, ads would only make that harder in my opinion. One might say it’s the same problems with large donors but then again there are plenty of small donors. Plus I think a large group of people engaged in Wikipedia dislikes the idea of making it a commercial project.
What they do is a bold idea but it’s even bolder to not make money out of it (while others take the content and do so without saying thanks) and they should stick to it.
Also, it’s nice to have at least one place on the web where they don’t try to sell you something or collect your data. There should be more to the web(2.0).
well, its all good to say that wikipedia should not go commercial but the funding for the servers and salaries at wikimedia have to to come from somewhere…
i don’t agree with the ad financing but im sure there is some other way…explore some sort of membership at a certain level..use other wiki channels to generate ad revenue…something else…
all of this talk about ‘it’s nice to have at least one place on the web where they don’t try to sell you something or collect your data’…. what about the persons working at wikipedia?!?! don’t they deserve to be paid something?
as i said…i don’t agree with ads on the pages, but there must be some way to generate some sort of reliable revenue so that the wikimedia foundation does not DIE
- Ads are against the wiki spirit.
- Hosting gets cheaper all the time.
- Fund raising is the way to go.
i think employees of wikipedia should not be paid. they all should be volunteers, just like in most foundations. and when it comes to site maintenance, it doesn’t require more than one guy. the only costs left are the servers and i’m sure they could get it sponsored. 3 millions dollars operation costs for such a website sounds way over the top. again another silicon valley venture with no reasonable sense of reality.
Adverts would not help the credibility of wikipedia, and may cause some contributors to ask where their cut of the ad revenue is.
I agree that advertising should at least be explored. The BBC site recently started carrying ads for international access, and I haven’t seen it degrade into a cesspit of vested interests (yet).
Plus if the sysops were paid, it might encourage people from a wider background to help out, instead of the anally-retented little Hitlers that currently run the place.
I have written come articles in Wikipedia…
I am here to claim my money!
To say that Wikipedia should run on ads is like saying churches should be sponsored by companies. Have you neotech people no shame? It should be easy for an established foundation like Wikipedia to continue receiving donations. A honor-roll type of listing for the biggest donators should be enough. Give a million, and get mentioned on the first page. That should be all.
“windfall” lol, is the ideal word indeed.
if a site as big as Wikipedia started posting ads…
I for one love the fact that Wikipedia is adless, and hope it stays that way.
Taking ad revenue would not be a pure plus for Wikipedia. If Wikipedia started carrying ads, they would almost certainly receive less money in donations – people are less inclined to donate if they know the recipient is getting money elsewhere and therefore “needs less of it”. Although there’s no real reason why a not-for-profit shouldn’t get its money from ads anymore than Oxfam shouldn’t make a profit on second-hand books and clothes, businesses don’t generally run on donations and charities don’t generally run on ad revenue.
They would also risk the perception, if not the reality, of being influenced by advertisers. My own view is that anyone who tries to influence their articles or others’ articles by donating to Wikipedia (or buying ads) is a drooling moron, given how little top-down power the executive is actually able to wield over the content of articles, and the community’s suspicion of paid interests. It would be far cheaper to simply learn how the system works and play it. But the perception is still there.
In the end, I really don’t see the point. Ads are a negative for readers, so if they don’t need them – if the existing donation model is adequate – why carry them? Some have suggested using ads to finance a rethink of the entire structure, e.g. paying admins. Personally, since ceasing to work as an admin (I didn’t leave as such, I just gradually stopped clicking the ‘edit’ button as other pursuits took over) I have been privately in favour of appointing some paid admins to cut a swathe through the fictional biographies etc. without worrying about the review processes. But that would be a major philosophical change and Wales et al is perfectly entitled to let the site continue as it is, with all its flaws. Particularly as theoretically, anyone with an idea on how to change Wikipedia for the better could simply take the content, make their changes and wait for the readers to switch (Wikipedia’s brand power aside).
Most foundations have paid staff and lots of non-profit organizations have revenues (other than donations). To have a revenue does not equal having a profit, although maybe a too large revenue could make some people greedy.
You have to differentiate content from operations and make sure to never use ad money to pay a contributor. You also have to make sure that the size of the paid staff is never too large and that the salaries are market salaries so nobody “profits” from it in some other way. These are normal issues in most foundations.
I think there’s less conflict of interest when you have a bunch of almost anonymous computer-fed google or yahoo ads running in a small panel in the page than when you have a couple of large donors who could have real influence over the organization.
Wow, that’s really cool. I wonder if they really need all that money?…
-Checkout my site for ways to earn money online.
http://mikesmon...b.blogspot.com/
Just wondering how wikipedia foundation manage work with just 15 employees?
Again, who visits Wikipedia? See for yourself:
http://mmx.type...ses-wikipe.html
@micfo:
I’m wondering what the hell they’re doing with 15 employees, that’s way too many for an operation like Wikipedia. Besides, almost anything and everything online can be managed by volunteers.
Would be cool if they first started by only advertising licensed/certified non profits. That would generate income, raise awareness for non profits, and profit non profits with an amazing advertising platform.
I’m wondering where the problem would be if they just ran Adsense/Yahoo ads and didn’t allow advertisers to target the site. That way there’s a disconnect between those placing the ads and those controlling the content. @17 Gonzalo has it right. Large non-profits have paid staffs. Where did we get the idea that it’s wrong to pay someone to do something. Wikipedia is 99.99% volunteers already. There’s nothing wrong with 15 paid employees for the 5th largest site on the Internet.
What is this fascination among the posters with non-profits? As if the employees are not paid. As if it takes no money to run the company?
From what I’ve seen in the past, non-profits are much more prone to internal corruption. There is less accountability because of their status.
Open, collaborative projects don’t need windfalls. They need idealistic volunteers. Advertising is the fastest way to scare such people away.
Come on, this is obvious stuff.
Wikipedia can consider many alternative revenue models and I hope it will never end up showing ads because ads “are evil”.