> Wikipedia spends $185m per year

Only a small fraction of that is spent on actually hosting the website. The rest goes into the pockets of the owners and their friends.

You can do a lot with very little if your primary goal isn't to enrich yourself.

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Atreiden 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you have a source for that?

Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...

Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.

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dpedu 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.

Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...

	▲	rrr_oh_man 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> $106M was spent on salaries and benefits …across 650 employees, which is $166K on average.

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kingstnap 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wikipedia's actual hosting is not expensive and never has been.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports...

If you look at the audited financial report of last year.

$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.

This is out of expenses of $190,938,007

Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.

Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.

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bakugo 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.

With an order of magnitude less data to host, though. The entirety of Wikipedia is less than 1PB [1], while the entirety of IA is 175+ PB [2].

Traffic is relatively cheap, especially for a very cache-friendly website like Wikipedia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

[2] https://archive.org/about/

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phatfish 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My countdown to donating to Wikipedia when a random MAGA nerd makes some baseless claims is getting close. When Elon had his little rant a couple of years ago it got triggered as well.

	▲	bakugo 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A fool and his money are soon parted.