Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

[Jimmy Wales]

Dan Grey wrote:
> Is it reasonable to believe that donations will increase in line with
> readers? Has anyone analysed the available data to see if this is
> happening?

I think it is reasonable _to an extent_, yes.  It is far from certain.
Mav can perhaps give you some statistics on this, but I believe he is
more pessimistic than I am about this.

> I'd also like to hear from the dev team (Domas? Kate?) as to whether
> our per-user hardware/bandwidth costs go up or down with increased
> readership (ie does it cost more per user to server lots of users
> rather than a few?).

I would like to hear this as well, but I can tell you that with our
current network architecture, I believe that readership/editorship is
more or less linear with traffic... that is, any "economies of scale" to
moving to a large network environment have already been exploited.

To serve twice as many requests, we need twice as much hardware.

--Jimbo