Chapter 10
For above a thousand years, the money of Europe has been flowing to Rome, by an open and sensible current; but it has been emptied by many secret and insensible channels. (David Hume).
Money had been the point and purpose of Jimbo’s business from the beginning. He had left futures trading in 1997 to make money out of a startup. “I’m the new economy -- I’m the internet”. But the difficulty of the internet is to make anything out of it. People have mocked Jimbo for failing to make money from the porn business, but in reality it was never a business in which there was much to be made.
Jimbo had the idea for Nupedia Foundation, later to become the Wikimedia Foundation in August 2000. The idea was to publish the content under an open licence, so that volunteers would not be put off from contributing. Nupedia, and later Wikipedia, would carry advertising. However, the Wikipedia community ruled out advertising in February 2002.
In its early years, the Foundation is run on a shoestring. Server costs are about $2,300 a month, and at any time they only have about $25,000 in the bank. Bomis is their only support, and Bomis is not so much run as hustled.
They finally get to the big money. In February 2006, Jimbo meets representatives from Elevation Partners, a private equity firm founded by Roger McNamee and Marc Bodnick, best known for its association with Bono, the lead singer of the group U2. Bodnick and McNamee give $300,000 to the Wikipedia organization personally, and help arrange another $1 million in donations. Probably Elevation Partners hope to get something for that money, but in the end, they ask for nothing.
Donations, first from foundations and venture capitalists, later from individuals, rise from $2.7 million in the financial year 2006-2007 to $25 million in 2011. The 2012-13 budget is $42m. Wikipedia is finally monetised, although as a non-profit. With the power to raise tens of millions of dollars, and with Wikipedia run by volunteers, the problem is how to spend it all. The Foundation is plagued by a series of ‘pay to play’ scandals. “Wikipedia receives much money from a visible source over the internet. The money is emptied in all kinds of invisible ways”.
