How would you monetize Wikipedia?

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How would you monetize Wikipedia?

Asked at Amazon over a year ago

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Lokesh Kumar R · Answer 1 · 2021-07-18T08:29:18+0000

It is always important to understand the question before attempting it. So I would like to start with understanding it before proceeding.

What do you mean by Monetize? Is it to make some revenue or Profits? Revenue.

Do we have a particular choice of place and device in mind? No, you're the % PM. It's your choice.

How is the performance of the Product? especially the Churn aspect? The Product health is as usual good. However, the Money aspect is what is missing for us. It is getting more and more costly to run the service like we use to do.

Oh, OK!

Do we have a time frame and a particular target for the revenue? Nothing so far.

Thanks for the above clarity. Would like to share my understanding about the product and then proceed to the next steps.

So, Wikipedia is one of the online medium that people use to know more about anything that they wish to. Right from movies, art forms to Games, Science Topics to Gods and Beliefs. Everything has an aswer, definition and loads of info on Wikipedia. It is more of a open-source information that anybody can access and edit as well provided one has an email id and internet access. The name is so used to people that it is even used in everyday basis to describe people who are up to date with a lots of things. Thus, in short the product is doing great and helping information be shared as a service. One important reasons for this to be famous is because of it's service as free.

Hope this makes sense and I have been able to share my understanding of the product. Yeah.

So, as a next step I would like to think of various source of monetization that Wikipedia can make use of to earn more. Post that would like to do an analysis on how effective is the solution on a long term using factors like Impact Size, Allignment to what Wikipedia is known for. Finally, will come up with one final answer.

Subscription Based Model- Similar to Medium one can limit the no. of articles that one can read through from Wikipedia per month and post that one has to pay a certain amount to get access to it
- One major factor to mention here is that Medium has profiles and based on that and other metrics that measures the quality of answer few are starred and medium has a limit on only those. While in Wikipedia we dont have anything like that.
- So, we can make sure to have this number either constant across genres of articles and get users pay us or Could Make few resources as premium ones and charge only for that.
Ad based Model- we can place related ads in the webpages that are related to articles. We can earn through a combination of Click Through Model, and price on # of Impression to get us our Revenue
- One important factor is to make sure that the ads are highly related to articels being read and as well as not too much in a single webpage.
- We should strictly avoid using ads on offers of different firms randomly as the Goal and Mission has always been to help people find relevant information and not to be a Advertising Column.
- No matter how much the ads are related, It is always a friction point in the users journey. So need to make sure that things are calculated in well advance
Patreon Method- We can ask the users to donate funds to their capacity to help us in continuing our service throughout every time they land on a webpage using popups and posters at the side of the page.

Idea	Impact to us	Impact to user	Allignment to Mission
1	High	Medium as not every user will be able to afford things and will lose one important way of knowing things	Low-as wikipedia always wanted to be an organization that helps its users know things without paying
2	High	High as users might get to know more about resources that help them more on knowing/experiencing things that they are readinf	Medium- As Wikipedia never wanted to be an advertising Column as well. If the ads system is made in a way that the ads are always more of extra resources to what user is trying to know, the ads will never been seen as ads instead as an extra resource
3	Low as more than 98% users never donate anything to Wikipedia and the patreon link is present like an age age old custom	High- As users dont need to donate if they dont want and at the same time gets to experience the Wikipedia free of any disturbances	High- This is coz neither ads are present nor are users charged. It is more of a donation that people can do if needed.

From the above discussion it is pretty obvious that the 1st idea is not somehting that we can choose. While, the second & third have their pros and cons to it and as well as give us our results in a way as well.

So from the 2nd and 3rd I would like to go with the 2nd as that will help users get more information on other resources and get to experience and learn things more. This will also give us a huge impact that and help us stay sustainable.

So to summarize, Patreon model though helps users in a great deal will not be sufficient for us make our existence a questionable thing. While the 2nd idea will both help us stay alive and as well as help users know more. One important note to be made is that though ads are shown, it must be in a way that it adds on to the knowledge that a user gets from Wikipedia and not some random ads on offers at Zomato, Movie tickets.

Angshuman Gupta · Answer 2 · 2019-05-30T15:46:53+0000

1. Questions?
  1. Why do we want to?
  2. What is the vision?
2. Users
  1. Students
  2. Academicians
  3. Parents
  4. Teachers
  5. Professionals
3. Target: Students, Parents and Teachers
4. Why do they use Wiki
  1. To search a content or information: Projects or Assignments
  2. To validate an information: Research or Correction
5. Pain Points
  1. Information may not be valid
  2. Real time collaboration with the source of truth or writer
  3. Collaboration with others accessing the content
6. Solutions
  1. Getting Live session with the writers based on payments: Having a Q&A session
  2. Paid internal wiki for educational institutes: Education Institute can keep the content Public or Private. And internal stakeholders like teachers and professors can update the content, students can keep a repository of projects that can be used by other students. The projects and assignments can be shared with parents.

PM Team · Answer 3 · 2019-04-15T14:08:32+0000

First the question would be to understand if the understanding of the product is correct . Wikipedia is a free community sourced encyclopedia that offers all information under the sun. Apart from that it offers free books, travel guides as well as course materials. But for the scope of this question, I am assuming we are restricted to the encyclopedia .

Understanding the users and pain points.

1 . Researchers who are writing a paper or researching a topic .

2. Students who need help with an assignment or homework

3. Teachers who prepare lesson plans

4. Casual users who wish to find out about a topic .

5. People who are passionate about certain topics or communities like sports lovers, entertainment buffs, etc

Pain Points:

1. Since it's community sourced, the article might be factually incorrect .

2. Instead of information on a topic, might need help with an answer or verification of a fellow researcher.

Probable Revenue Sources:

1. Expert Series: Engaging key influencers to write content on a topic on a subscription basis .

2 . Answer a question: Get credits for answering a question or buy for getting it answered .

3. Research paper services: Take help of fellow researchers on giving you feedback on a paper .

I think of the three, the first one is the best on, as for others you have alternatives in place.

Vishal Shah · Answer 4 · 2021-07-25T22:21:36+0000

It's been a while I have looked into details of Wikipedia so I may not know all the additional features they have. So to clarif, it's a site where all users of the site can edit any article they like and anyone can create brand new material / article. Wikipedia also has other products such as Wikibooks, Mediawiki, etc. So it's a site taht enables people across the globe to collaboratively enhance knnowledge materail. (correct).

Since we are looking to monetize Wikipedia, is it a correct understanding that we want to make money? (yes). Are we focused on revenue or profits? (profit should be ultimate goal for all businesses so let's focus on profits).

And are we focused on profits overall or for specific product of Wikipedia? (overall). Ok, since I am more familiar with Wikipedia than other products, and I do believe that Wikipedia has the most potential of bring profits vs. other products of Wikipedia, my responses are prob going to be tunnel visioned assuming Wikipedia is the only product. Is that ok? (sure that's fine for now).

So I think what I want to do is think of ways we can monetize Wikipedia and then if those can bring profits and what might the risks be. (sure).

brainstorming ways...

1. Making it a paid service

2. Advertising

These are tehe only two high level thoughts but I see lot of different things we could possibly do for #1. #2 might be good revneue boost and help us with probability of profit, the downside is user experience. Let's think of #1 more and put #2 in parking lot. Maybe depending on what I have for #1 we can prob combine some aspects of #2? This isn't a new startegy and has been applied at many businesses.

So for #1:

1. Charge a fee per day for being able to read entirety of a section of an article. Here I am thinking, one can read first 30 words in each section of an article and to read more user has to pay a 1 time fee that unlocks all articles for entire day for that user.

2. Charge monthly subscription which is likely a better route given the type of product this is.

3. Implement methods to calculate discount based as an incentive to reduce next month's bill based on how much content is created by the reader. This actually helps towards engagement and retention because if I am given discount on my monthly subscrition by me creating content, I am going to be motivated to create content and that will result in better user experience for other readers since tehy will have better and more content on Wikipedia so they will become paid users which will push up revenue.

Given osme options here, I would go with all of #1, and #2 and #3. #2 and #3 can be combined in a single solution. #1 helps generate revenue from occasional readers. I really don't expect to generate much revenue from #1 option.

I think we could discuss advertising route as well. (sure).

For advertising, pay per day users will still see advertisements but monthly subscription users don't. REason being that monthly subscription users pay subscription to generate revenue and if they are paying we should provide them uninterrupted clean user experience but for pay per use users we need to generate enough revenue which can be done by using advertising. Many businesses use advertising for free customers to monetize from them.

The challenge I do see here is taht there is huge competition for Wikipedia in the sense that ther are many other websites wher you can gain same information from. So there is a high risk of alienating users by implementing monetization methodologies like subscription model. In that case, advertsing may be the best. But for our ucse csae here, I am going to bet on #2 and #3, sinnce Implementation cost is low and I don't see any impact on user experience if they are able to get bettter content (better / more content by incentivizing users from posting more to get discounts on subscription). We would however have to implement ways to evaluate content quality and validity, however, so I think the risk / immplementation cost is high (chanign my answer).

(Great! thank you for your inputs).