On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:12 AM, bitch at 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.
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ Wikimedia:About#How_is_the_revenue_spent.3F>
> 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 <http://upload.wikimedia.org/
wikipedia/foundation/2/28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf>.
>