[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Michael Snow]

On 3/14/2013 11:36 PM, Theo10011 wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure why you would use traffic ranking for financial analysis,
>> even the envelope-and-napkin kind of analysis we're engaging in here. I'm
>> pretty confident that just because Google has been sitting at #1 for some
>> time, it doesn't mean that their core operational costs have remained flat
>> over that period.
> I'm actually not using the traffic for financial analysis. I'm only using
> the trend in traffic to compare the hosting costs - I think it would be
> fair to assume that both are intrinsically linked. :)
>
> The analysis of 6M/ year wasn't based on traffic at all, it was from the
> annual budget and expenditure I saw in the reports, though that was an
> envelope-and-napkin kind of analysis, it wasn't entirely based on
> conjectures either.
I didn't say you used traffic ranking to support your own estimate, you 
used it to try and rebut the estimates provided by Erik and others. 
That's still a kind of analysis.
>   I also think its unfair to compare Wikipedia with
> google, but if you were to take a top 10 traffic website and separate
> their infrastructure and cap-ex, and look at annual operational costs
> especially with things like bandwidth cost, it would have to be comparable.
> (Maybe not for google but let's say for twitter or linked.in - comparable
> bandwidth usage *is* the reason they are in the same league.)
The point about Google was strictly to illustrate how useless traffic 
ranking is for extrapolating about trends in operational costs. It's not 
a suggestion that Wikimedia can or should compare its cost structure to 
Google's.

--Michael Snow