Who owns Wikipedia?, I am not a lawyer Options

[Peter Damian]

I've heard claims here occasionally that Wikipedia could be sold off. Is that possible? Who actually owns it? What is it they actually own? Could anyone get their hands on it and make a ton of money from ? What would they be getting their hands on?

[Somey]

There are two things that strike me about this, aside from the fact that even the most short-sighted businesses don't sell their #1 asset merely to "advance their stated goals."

The first, and the most obvious, is how they would reconcile the fact that Wikimedia isn't actually a charity (in any meaningful sense of the word) with these self-imposed restrictions on unloading assets, which are presumably in there primarily (if not solely) to support its spurious claim that it really is a charity. I don't think they can, so they would have to change their bylaws to make the sale, and if people got wind of the attempt in advance, they might try to stop them. I was actually thinking that these bylaws might serve an additional purpose, namely to prevent any kind of takeover whatsoever, friendly, hostile, or otherwise. (I doubt that would have been intentional, though.)

The second is that when you go from not being ad-supported to being even partially ad-supported, you have some pretty serious work to do. You're going to need some additional infrastructure in the organization - sales-people, a fulfillment department, dedicated technical support staff, maybe another accountant or three. It's likely they'd want to start small and ramp up - maybe just run something in the sidebar or a small sitewide banner, probably using some sort of automatic rotation scheme. If they suddenly threw in a whole bunch of new/untested features to show targeted ads based on page content (sort of like Google AdSense) or allow advertisers to buy space on particularly "hot" articles (namely those related to porn, politics, and current entertainment and media properties), that would be very risky, IMO.

I guess what I'm saying WRT advertising is that I believe the estimates of Wikipedia's value as an advertising platform are grossly inflated. I can certainly see them getting into 7 figures per year, maybe 8 later on if they do it right. But 50 million? I just don't see it, personally, unless several other media markets just completely collapse in the short term.

[EricBarbour]

I guess what I'm saying WRT advertising is that I believe the estimates of Wikipedia's value as an advertising platform are grossly inflated. I can certainly see them getting into 7 figures per year, maybe 8 later on if they do it right. But 50 million? I just don't see it, personally, unless several other media markets just completely collapse in the short term.

You might be correct, given the use patterns and userbase.

Don't forget that Facebook made $1.86 billion last year, from advertising
(more-or-less the only revenue generator they've got).
But then, it's been absurdly overvalued by investors--currently $50 billion.
I doubt an "encyclopedia" run by a bunch of Aspies could ever come close to that.

Maybe they could start a "MY Wikipedia" social site like Facebook?
Leverage their brand a little bit?

(Did you know that mywikipedia.com redirects to a spam-filled blog?)

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sun 30th January 2011, 12:08am

[radek]

I guess what I'm saying WRT advertising is that I believe the estimates of Wikipedia's value as an advertising platform are grossly inflated. I can certainly see them getting into 7 figures per year, maybe 8 later on if they do it right. But 50 million? I just don't see it, personally, unless several other media markets just completely collapse in the short term.

You might be correct, given the use patterns and userbase.

Don't forget that Facebook made $1.86 billion last year, from advertising
(more-or-less the only revenue generator they've got).
But then, it's been absurdly overvalued by investors--currently $50 billion.
I doubt an "encyclopedia" run by a bunch of Aspies could ever come close to that.

Maybe they could start a "MY Wikipedia" social site like Facebook?
Leverage their brand a little bit?

(Did you know that mywikipedia.com redirects to a spam-filled blog?)

Mmmm.... agree with that. It's like Yahoo!'s market value at one point was greater than of all the automobile producing firms in US put together and people bought into that. And these days most "kids" don't even know what a "Yahoo!" is, more or less. Same thing with Facebook. Silly pop culture movies made for the "meme of the day"and the "celebritization" of the guy behind it are actually a pretty good indication that soon no one will care.

For better or worse somehow I don't think the same is true for Wikipedia. Too much "economies of scale" and path dependence.