aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Wikipedia $$$ woes

Florence Devouard, chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation, is quoted as having said that, “If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear” Lift conference in Geneva. Today Mathew Ingram comments:

Couldn’t Chad Hurley or Steve Chen, who are now multimillionaires, or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or one of a dozen other billionaire geeks cough up a measly $1-million or $2-million to keep the lights on at Wikipedia? And the second is whether this might revive interest in Jason Calacanis’s idea of running small ads on the site, which he said at one point was worth as much as $5-billion.

Oh yes, and one other thing: Why doesn’t Wikipedia do a deal with Amazon to use its S3 virtual hosting to handle the site’s data demands? Don McAskill, CEO of SmugMug, says doing that has saved the photo-sharing site about $500,000 a year, and they’re only using it for part of their site.