Bloomberg Interviews Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry | Tuesday December 22, 2009 | 492 views

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was on Bloomberg TV earlier this week to clarify that there has not been a mass exodus of voluntary editors. Wikipedia is still very much driven by the community.

Wales also revealed some interesting numbers about Wikipedia. To maintain Wikipedia, it costs around $10 million per year. The website survives primarily off of donations. So far Wikipedia has over $3 million in donations for the year.

Personally I’m impressed by how little it costs to maintain Wikipedia. On a per day basis, it costs about $27,397.26 to keep Wikipedia running.

What about some of the other top websites? As a comparison, YouTube costs about $2 million per day in just storage and bandwidth. Facebook most likely costs close to $300,000 per day considering that they are hosting 10 billion photos. In 2007 and early 2008, Facebook spent around $67 million on rackable servers. Facebook most likely spends $500 million per year between servers, employee salaries, infrastructure, office space, and other miscellaneous costs.

Below is a video of the interview [via BusinessInsider]:

Categorized under Bloomberg L.P., Jimmy Wales, The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

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Gregory Kohs

In actuality, because the Mediawiki software renders pages that are easily cached and serve up mostly text (certainly not video or pages and pages of images), it only costs about $1.2 million per year to physically sustain Wikipedia with bandwidth and servers, including the salaries of about 3 developers. This information is all available in the legal Form 990 document that the Wikimedia Foundation is required to file.

Where is the rest of the $10 million budget going? Mostly to salaries of a bloated staff of 35 who sit back and watch the 99.5% of the work that is being performed by unpaid volunteers. Also, the Foundation tucks away between $1 million and $2 million into a bank savings account for a rainy day in the future.

The other firms you cite (YouTube and Facebook) cost more because those companies are trying to ramp up to a state of profitability. It costs money to make money. Wikipedia has no such profitability incentive, so that's why costs are kept low.

I run a site with over 50,000 pages, and over 1,200 unique visitors per day. It costs 61 cents per day to run. Do the math.