[Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed

[William Pietri]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> What resources?  With only ~1.5M hits per month, EN Wikinews' share of
> the tech / internet services budget probably only comes to a couple
> thousand dollars per year, in other words basically a rounding error
> in the budget.

I'd guess it's less than that. I just calculated cost/pageview numbers 
for a client that serves a lot of pages, and adding the Wikinews traffic 
to their load would cost them maybe $40/month, even including a share of 
hardware costs.

I don't have the WMF numbers handy to do the equivalent comparison, but 
I wouldn't be surprised if WMF page views were an order of magnitude 
cheaper given their scale and their non-profit status.

Either way, it's plausible Wikinews covers its own expenses through 
generated donations. Shutting it down would also have costs, both 
financial and reputational. So the question for me isn't so much, 
"should we keep it running?" but, "why would we pay to kill it?"

William