From The Hustle
Chances are, you use Google to find answers. Chances also are, Google uses Wikipedia to find answers to your questions.
Partly because of this -- and other cases like it -- Wikipedia’s site traffic has remained static for years.
That’s a problem for the Wikimedia Foundation -- a nonprofit that relies on site traffic to drive donations that support its existence.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and others leverage Wikipedia’s content for a wide range of commercial purposes, including:
The Wikimedia Foundation is fully aware that Big Tech invests big money into reworking Wikipedia data for its own products.
Any company can freely use Wikipedia data through a clunky API. But Wikipedia-reliant products need teams of people to clean up and manage data.
So, the nonprofit is building the Wikimedia Enterprise API -- designed to quickly deliver cleaned, tailored data paired with high-level customer service -- to make the process easier, faster, and a whole lot cheaper.
Individual donations aren’t going anywhere -- Wikimedia estimates ~8m readers will donate this year at an average of $15 per donation. In 2019, the foundation raised $122m, up 18.5% YoY.
But as Wikipedia’s content is increasingly drawn from the site rather than viewed on wikipedia.org, the foundation sees a need to diversify its revenue streams for the long run.
It’s a strategic move from one of the world’s most successful internet companies (the 13th most-visited site in the world) -- that also just so happens to be a nonprofit.
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