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

[Delphine Ménard]

On 10/26/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Actually, I just said my gut feeling was that the donation curve would not
> follow the cost curve forever. What is needed is a statistical assessment of
> the two. However, looking *only* at two fund drive data points and two traffic
> data points gives some reason to be optimistic.
>
> Q3 2004 Fund Drive grand total:                       $44,863.95 USD
> September 2004 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 3.2 million
>
> Q4 2005 Fund Drive grand total:                         $243,930 USD
> September 2005 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 12.8 million
>
> So, there has been a 533% increase in donations for a 400% increase in traffic.
> Throw in Moore's Law and things look even better. However, the traffic numbers
> are only for wikipedia.org and this only tracks unique visitors; those visitors
> likely use Wikipedia more often today than they did last year. The other
> projects, esp Commons, Wiktionary and Wikinews are starting to become popular
> as well. So I'll tend to be pessimistic until I'm able to analyze some hard
> data for every one of our domains (data with consistent standards - esp for the
> non-wikipedia.org domains - has been difficult to come by).

OK for the present statistics. And cool. :-)
I'll just add that those were fundraising drives with a goal. So
people play along. The problem in my opinion is when we start asking
for 1 million per quarter. ;-) But I guess we'l have to see.

>
> > Small donations originated by fundraising drives are something we
> > should *count* on, but not something we should *rely* on. We're not
> > the only ones out there asking for money, and I believe that it is
> > also our job to be looking elsewhere for hard cash.
>
> Well, we kinda do have to rely on small donations. Small donations, not big
> ones or grants, make up the vast majority of our income. Relying too much on
> any one or select few big donors, grants or income from partnership agreements
> puts us in jeopardy if any one or several of them pull their funding. But the
> answer to that is to have *lots* of big donors, grants, and income streams from
> partnerships. However, I think your point was that we should not simply rely on
> donations in general as our sole income stream. Yep - I agree with that 100%.
> We also need to diversity our income in general - we can't be too reliant any
> one source

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to say. I used rely in that sentence
as in "fundraising drives cannot be our _only_ source of revenue",
which is what I understood Jtkiefer was hinting at, when she/he said :
"Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't wikimedia just adjust their
donation goals to cover that and thus cover the cost of new
hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?"


> I get several emails in the ORTS donation queue each week from people who
> either don't have cash or who want to donate in a currency that we don't
> accept. I tell each that their donation of time in either contributing content
> or telling people about Wikipedia is just as important as giving money. That
> Wikipedia would not exist without volunteer effort.

Yes. Been there, done that ;-).
It is an immense paradox isn't it, that Wikipedia would not exist
without volunteers, but also would not exist if we did not have the
money to run the servers that host it?


Delphine
--
~notafish