Jimmy Wales: The Tech Tycoon You Haven’t Heard Of
Jimmy Wales is a tech founder who created the 10th most popular website on Earth. Each day, the site gets more visits than Amazon, Yahoo, Reddit, Netflix, LinkedIn, or Twitter. And, while the founders of those sites enjoy a net worth in the tens or hundreds of billions, Wales is worth a relatively modest 1 million (USD).
The website he created is Wikipedia, and the story of Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia’s success is a fascinating case study on the strength of community, the power of creed, and the importance of redefining success.
Community
The English language version of Wikipedia currently has over 6 million articles, and around 600 new ones are added each day. Last month alone there were 1.5 million pages edited, and all these changes are made by a global group of unpaid volunteers.
This means that anyone can edit any article. There is no minimum or maximum contribution, no obligation of any kind, and contributions are made in the free time of volunteers. With no remuneration, and basically no public credit (other than that which is buried a few layers deep on the talk page of a Wikipedia article), it’s hard to say what motivates these volunteers.
According to Wales, it’s the mission that drives the community. In a recent interview, he expressed that most of the editors are just deeply interested in the topics they engage with. Editing these pages can be a source of rich discussion and provide a way to meet people who share common — and perhaps niche — interests. He went on to say “…if you spend a few hours editing Wikipedia you can go to sleep and think ‘yeah it was productive… the world is a little bit better than it was’ and someone somewhere will benefit”.
As the volunteers work and the number of available articles grows, so too do the number of users who frequent the site seeking the free information it holds. And, as we have seen before (think Facebook, Uber, to name a few), businesses with a significant user base are often seen as having significant money-making potential. With an enormous user base and the potential for large sums of money to be made, why isn’t Wales among tech’s mega-rich?
Creed
Wales, when asked to define Wikipedia’s purpose, said: “Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet…”.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001, and in 2003 Wales turned it over to be run by the Wikimedia Foundation (a not-for-profit which he chairs). He has said that there were a few reasons for this decision, including “the community of volunteers very much wanted it to be in a non-profit”. Further, that it would be central to Wikipedia’s desire to remain independent and for people to be able to read and write about what they wanted, free from financial influence.
Even as a non-profit, though, Wikipedia needs capital to remain alive. With a publisher model and a large number of daily active users, one obvious path to monetization would have been to host paid advertisements on the site. When asked about this, Wales stated that they did consider running paid advertising in the early days (as the laws which govern not-for-profit organizations don’t prevent it). However, he added that he knew it would be hard to stop a growing organization from following the money, and was worried that they would start to care more about which pages people visited and less about the mission. As such, there has never been paid advertising hosted on Wikipedia.
Instead, Wikipedia is funded almost entirely by small donations from the many users who appreciate its mission. Each year, Wikipedia runs a fundraising campaign to maintain their servers and retain a small number of paid staff. Last year the average donation was just $15. According to some estimates, if Wikipedia had chosen to go the publisher/advertising route instead, they could be worth around $5 billion.
Redefining success
Why is it that more people know about Jeff Bezos than Jimmy Wales? Both started companies which are incredibly widely known, both companies provide a tangible benefit to their users, and more people use Wikipedia than Amazon. However, while Bezos made a mega-fortune from Amazon, Wales’ decision to implement Wikipedia with a non-profit model means that he will never make a fortune from it. Fortunately, it also means that so long as we continue to find it useful, Wikipedia’s influence is likely to long outlast that of the other tech giants.
It is likely that if Wales had chosen to make Wikipedia for-profit, and was today a multi-billionaire, more people would herald his story as the profound achievement that it really is. Perhaps we ought to redefine our understanding of success to one which is underpinned by something other than amassing huge personal wealth. Is it not equally impressive that someone who could have made billions chose not to for the betterment of humankind?
As a result of that decision, Jimmy Wales isn’t a billionaire. But, he did create a free and openly accessible wealth of information which is maintained by a benevolent army of volunteers. On any given day, 15% of global Internet users visit Wikipedia. By any measure, that’s an enormous success.
