Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently made a plea to Wikipedia users via a flashy new header atop Wikipedia asking for more donations.  According to an article in ArsTechnica, Wikipedia’s operating expenses for 2008 were $6 million USD, up from $3.5 million in 2007.  Wikipedia has been struggling to keep up their cash reserves while meeting demands, and with everyone being more conservative with their money, it’s unclear whether people will continue to open their wallets and donate to Wikipedia.

There’s no question that Wikipedia is widely used across the Internet.  Wikipedia’s comScore rank was number 7 in March 2008, with over 58 million unique visitors.

And given their traffic, there’s no question that the cost of running their infrastructure is going to be high, and growing annually.  Cloud computing guru James Hamilton, who recently left Microsoft to take a post at Amazon’s Web Services division, wrote about Wikipedia’s architecture.  Among the interesting points: Wikipedia gets 50,000 http requests per second, and has over 18 million objects (pages and attachments) in the English version alone.  The infrastructure powering includes a total of somewhere around 300 servers.

One alternative that has been discussed is the idea of adding advertisements on the site.  But that may not ultimately provide enough revenue for Wikipedia to pay off its operating expenses, and it could open the door for alternative services to pop up that don’t include advertising.

So where would that leave Wikipedia?  If they go the advertising route, and that ultimately doesn’t pan out, could they switch to a pay-for-access premium service?  And would customers pay?  It might be an alternative to save themselves, but I’m not sure how many people would ultimately pay for access to Wikipedia.

I suppose one other possibility for Wikipedia is that they get acquired by some other entity that wants to leverage them only for the brand name recognition.  A larger player, perhaps Amazon or Microsoft for example, could easily afford to take the annual loss, and treat it as a method of extending good will amongst their customers and potential future customers.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing, Wikis