So Wikipedia publishes its financials each year, although I’d never taken a close look before.
It’s interesting. As a Top 10 website:
- Wikipedia only spends $3m on hosting. I would have thought a lot more.
- Wikipedia spends $107m a year on salaries. Given that all the content is free and community-edited, I would have thought less.
My guess probably would have been $20m / $40m or so. $20m for hosting, $40m for salaries.
And note that since Wikipedia’s runs its own data centers, the fully burdened costs of hosting are higher. This does not include most of the headcount-related expenses. Still, the hosting expenses are much lower than I would have expected.
It’s also a reminder that human costs of maintaining technology get pretty expensive at scale. Even when technology itself often scales pretty efficiently.
It’s not SaaS per se and it’s also a nonprofit, but I think we can learn a lot from any web business at scale.
A few other smaller tidbits:
- Wikipedia has about $200m in cash and cash-equivalent saved up
- Has $23m of computer equipment
- It doesn’t waste money on offices. Their lease in SF is only $420k a year.
- 4% matching on 401k. Not the most you could do, nor the least.
