Doug Henwood Talks

On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:12 AM, bitch@pulpculture.org wrote:

“little to no capital investment” — except if you have half a
brain, it probably used just as much capital investment. Someone
donated space to Wiki, others created entries, someone created the
code, users supplied free market research and feedback, the kind
that other companies pay for. None of this is “free” and you can
assign a value to all of it and find out precisely how much it costs.

Wikipedia ain’t free, either. It’s pretty low-budget, but it has
capital and operating expenses as well as salaries. Salaries in 2006
totaled $107,122, which, while quite small, are up from $16,930 in
2005 and $0 in 2004. Which suggests that when “free” things grow up
they get more complex and expensive.

The majority of WMF expenditures support our programs. Foremost are
our expenses for the hardware and bandwidth that keep our websites
up and running.

The single greatest expenditure for WMF is hardware, followed by
hosting and bandwidth costs. The WMF has seen its inventory of
computer hardware increase steadily to meet demand. Here is a
frequently updated status of this hardware: Wikimedia hardware status.

The main reason for the increase is our growth in traffic. At the
end of the year 2006, Comscore listed “Wikipedia Sites” as the
number six site in the world, measured by unique visitors ().
Wikipedia, our flagship website, received about 285,000 page views
per minute. The WMF is concerned about the capitalization and
operational commitments necessary to keep these systems running
reliably. These costs alone will exceed $2.5 million in the year 2007. () Excludes traffic from mobile phones, PDAs, and public computers
such as Internet cafes.

Domain registration and trademarks are another part of Wikimedia’s
expenditures. The Foundation already owns some of its active and
secondary/tangentially-related domain names, while others are still
free or already owned.

Due to the increase in office staff, administrative costs
increased. Overall, however, the allocation of expenses for
fundraising is low, due to WMF’s reliance on online donations for
the majority of its revenue. WMF does not engage in “direct mail”
advertising campaigns. Given WMF’s presence online, it makes sense
to communicate and ask for donations in the same virtual space. To
date, it has been effective.

Costs have been kept low in the past three years, in particular
because the largest majority of people helping are volunteers. The full financial statements are at .

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