Wikipedia IPO, Why Won’t This Unbeatable Online Dictionary Go Public, And Why They Are Actually a Nonprofit Organization
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The much awaited Wikipedia IPO is unfortunately probably not something that you’ll see in my own or in your lifetime, in that the company is actually structured as a nonprofit organization and runs solely on donations from generous readers. Shocking thing is that were they to put ads up, they would make at least an order of magnitude more in annual revenue, probably to the tune of billions of dollars of extra money per year, which they could then use to scale and become an internet empire. However, they are going with their free information game, and not only have to take donations from regular people to survive, but bring in more than $110,000,000.00 per year in annual revenue, per their 2020 numbers, still not too shabby of a takeaway. And so in this blog post, we’ll talk about why a Wikipedia Initial Public Offering will probably never happen, and of why I think they’re crazy to not be running advertisements and taking the billions per year in profits that they should be getting.
Other sites like Wikipedia include:
Dictionary.org
Amazon
Apple
Investopedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Scholarpedia
Citizendium
And a host of other websites, read on or subscribe to our blog for additional details and information.
Why A Wikipedia IPO May Never Happen, And Likely WILL Never Happen
So, the founders have been extremely clear on the possibility of an Initial Public Offering for Wikipedia as a company, and the odds are at near zero that this will ever happen. Take the fact that they choose to go for donations rather than ads, at probably a 20x per year annual revenue loss (they are seriously the third largest website in the world based on traffic yet they only bring in about $110M per year in revenue, ALL from donations) with literally billions in lost revenue, and add that into them being a nonprofit due to them not wanting to charge the people….even though they beg for donations regularly, and I smell a rat in this one. In any case, I’m sure that I’m missing something here that would shock me as to the actual reason why this is being done, but either way, we likely won’t see a Wikipedia IPO in our lifetime.
Why a Wikipedia IPO Still Could Possibly Happen
Just as with everything else in life, Money talks and the rest takes the bus, and even in the case of Wikipedia or nonprofit organizations, the motto is no different. I think a lot of this could definitely be chalked up to greed on some level, in that if they ever do come grubbing for that hot advertiser money, than the simple fact remains that advertisers will be licking their chops at the opportunity to be listed on the front page of Wikipedia, will report back and see how this all plays out over the next ten years.
How Much Traffic Wikipedia Gets, How Much Money They Make, And How Much Money They Could Be Making
Wikipedia gets around 100 million visitors per day and 275,000,000 pageviews per day per my sources on netvaluator.com. And while this is more of an educated guess, I think that with ads, or say an email list, that they could easily generate revenues of $2B to $3 Billion dollars per year on the low end. Just putting your run of the mill ad re-targeting software on traffic like that would give them about $4,000,000.00 per day in revenue, at a standard $0.04 per visitors click through rate and payout. this would be $1.3 Billion per year right there, add in e-commerce products and a solid email list and you could easily 10x that at scale, especially with acquisitions of other related websites to expand on their empire. Given that human nature is generally programmed to overreach and to conquer, it is definitely odd and suspicious that Wikipedia has not done this yet, but to them I say Kudos, good for them if they can make it work!
Edit***Wikipedia actually gets around 400,000,000 visitors per day, so take those figures above and multiply them all by four. They could easily hit $15 to $20B per year just in ad revenue alone, and probably closer to like $45B per year with E-Commerce and email list revenue thrown in, an IPO of $200-$400 Billion would not be unrealistic in this scenario! Still blows my mind why they settle for $100M per year rather than being a massive corporation.
Final Thoughts on a Possible Wikipedia IPO, My Opinion on the Subject
And so, once again, if anyone can tell me why Wikipedia would not collect the $15B per year in annual revenue that they totally could get their hands on, only to IPO at $250 to $300,000,000,000.00, yes you read that correctly $300 Billion, please leave a comment down below and let us know. It seems to me that them generating all that advertising revenue and then giving it back to the people would be a better use than them being ad free….but really what do I know. For more information, comment and subscribe!
Cheers!
*Inflation Hedging.com
Sources:
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/cd-rates/
https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/
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