Public Goods

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website on earth. It serves over 20 billion page views every month in 350 languages with no advertising of any kind. Anyone with an internet connection can read it. Anyone with a keyboard can edit it. Most users never pay a cent. The site has no paywall, no subscription, no upsell, no premium tier. It exists because a small minority of users decide to fund it. The economics of running it are not small. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the servers and pays the engineering staff, runs on roughly 170 million US dollars a year. The site does not run itself. It runs on the back of donations from a tiny percentage of readers who every December see the appeal banner from Jimmy Wales and click through to give five or 10 or $20.