Wikimedia Enterprise Financial Report: Fiscal Year 2024 – 2025

Summary

This is the fourth annual financial report for Wikimedia Enterprise – for the fiscal year 2024-25. We are pleased to share that not only does this report show the first complete year of profitability, but even more importantly, that earned revenue has now fully repaid the initial investment in the project from previous fiscal years. Within four years of its launch Wikimedia Enterprise is now a net-contributor to the financial stability of the Wikimedia projects.

During this period, both annual revenue and expenses increased compared to the previous annual report, to $8.3M and $4.4M respectively. The revenue has seen a 148% increase from the prior year, and represents 4% of Wikimedia Foundation’s total revenue for the period. This is both consistent with the projections published in the prior report, and also in alignment with the 2024-2025 Annual Plan goal to diversify revenue streams. While the overall fundraising strategy of the Wikimedia Foundation will always remain focused on individual donations, this revenue helps reduce sole dependency on banner fundraising and safeguard the financial future of the projects. This report is published alongside the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2024-2025 audit report, which outlines the full picture of the Foundation’s revenue and expenses.

In addition to meaningfully contributing to the financial sustainability of Wikimedia through revenue, Enterprise’s long term contractual relationships have assisted in decreasing the technical and financial burden of scraping on our public infrastructure. This also improves our ability to advocate for improvements in the way Wikimedia content is reused (e.g. calling for improved attribution when content is republished).

Technical developments of Wikimedia Enterprise during this reporting period are summarized at the end of this report. This notably includes improved Structured Contents output, Quality scoring models, and the Python SDK.

Context 

Wikimedia Enterprise provides enterprise-grade APIs for high-volume reusers of Wikimedia content, as originally announced in 2021. This generates income from large commercial partners by providing the high-capacity infrastructure and contractual service guarantees that they require, while ensuring the freely-licensed content on Wikipedia remains accessible and usable by everyone. It is consistent with the recommendations from the 2030 movement strategy process to increase the financial sustainability of the Wikimedia movement and to improve the user experience via the API suite in partnership with large scale reusers. 

The project’s objectives and key results for the 2025-26 fiscal period are also available. These include: growing revenue by no less than 10% year over year (with particular emphasis on AI which heavily utilises Wikimedia content); supporting the “responsible infrastructure strategy” and implementation of a cohesive overall developer experience; integrating additional structured Wikimedia data and machine-readable access to more elements of all Wikimedia projects’ content. 

Wikimedia Enterprise represents a small but growing proportion of the Wikimedia Foundations’ revenue. Nevertheless, the overall fundraising strategy of the Wikimedia Foundation will always remain focused on small donations from individual donors looking to protect the future of the free knowledge ecosystem. By having large commercial organisations pay for their own heavy use of our infrastructure, this ensures donated money does not need to be allocated to subsidize their business requirements. 

Revenue

During fiscal year (FY) 2024-2025, total revenue for Wikimedia Enterprise was $8.3 million – an increase of 148% from the $3.4M reported in FY 2023-2024.  This represents 4.0% of the Wikimedia Foundation’s total revenue for the period. This revenue is also shown within the 2024-25 Wikimedia Foundation audit report.

Wikimedia Enterprise had 13 commercial customers utilising the paid tier of the service at the end of this financial reporting period. This includes single and multi-year contracts for either monetary or in-kind support, as well as organisations currently trialing the service. Some new customers announced since the previous annual report include Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata.ai, and Nomic AI.    

Also, there are many more individuals and organisations using the free tier. New commercial contracts signed since June 30 and the publication of this report will be represented in the 2025-26 FY report.

Expenses

Total Wikimedia Enterprise expenses (including cost of services) during FY 2024-2025 were $4.4 million, up slightly from $3.8 million in FY 2023-2024. 

A breakdown of expenses by type are shown in the section below.

Financial performance detail for FY 2024-2025 and FY 2023-2024

Since inception in January 2022 through June 2025, Wikimedia Enterprise has netted a profit of $646K. It has now fully repaid all investment from its first three years of operation. 

$USD Thousands	FY 24-25	FY 23-24	% change
Revenue (Subscription & Prof. Services)	$8,298	$3,351	148%
Cost of Services	$1,160	$839	38%
Internet Hosting Charges	$478	$320	49%
Software Amortization	$591	$432	37%
Customer Support	$90	$87	4%
Gross Profits	$7,138	$2,512	184%
Operating Expenses	$3,277	$2,919	12%
Staffing Costs	$2,101	$1,751	20%
Prof. Services and Contractors	$425	$565	-25%
Other Operating Expenses (Incl. 15% Overhead Charge)	$751	$602	25%
Net Profit (Loss) Before Tax	$3,861	-$407	-1048%
Income Tax	$8	25.2	-70%
Net Profit (Loss)	$3,854	-$432	-991%

Financial Oversight

In accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation Commercial Sales and Contracts Policy, income from Wikimedia Enterprise would be capped at 30% of the total Wikimedia Foundation annual revenue. This policy was formalised in May 2025 and  codified the operating principle of financial independence established by the 2021 Board of Trustees statement. This cap was established in order to ensure that the majority of funding continues to come from small donations from millions of readers – a key ingredient to ensuring Wikimedia’s ongoing independence.

All users of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs and datasets who wish to use the service’s paid tier (for very high volume/speed and associated service level obligations [SLAs]) are subject to review in order to assess any potential human rights-related risks that could arise as a result of the agreement, in line with the commitments made in the Foundation’s Human Rights Policy. The Board of Trustees is notified in advance of all agreements which are, “…large-dollar contract amount, non-standard contract terms, reputational risk, financial exposure, or compliance issues”. This is intentionally consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Gifts Policy. While it is policy that the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to publicly acknowledge revenue sources, customers may choose to remain anonymous – this is consistent with privacy principles allowing anonymous donations and anonymous access of Wikimedia content. 

The taxation obligations of Wikimedia Enterprise are explained in a dedicated section in the inaugural annual fiscal report. Please note that while total revenue increased, our tax expense decreased because the revenue related to professional services, which is the taxable portion of Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, decreased compared to the prior year.

Technical update highlights

While financial updates are published annually, technical updates are published quarterly on the project’s MediaWiki page. Notable technical additions and improvements since the last annual report include:

Structured Contents output improvements. Enterprise’s Structured Contents endpoints now also include parsed tables from Wikipedia, references, and citations. 

Being able to retrieve Wikipedia tables as structured JSON unlocks a treasure trove of highly valuable human-curated data. The information provided through tables on Wikipedia covers the whole gamut of possible knowledge topics: music charts, filmographies, lists of nominees, catalogs of heads of state, sports standings, and so much more. 

In addition to adding tables to Structured Contents, references and citations are now also part of the Structured Contents JSON payload. References and citations are absolutely vital to ground information from Wikipedia projects in truth by linking to trusted and verifiable sources. The JSON output from Wikimedia Enterprise’s APIs reliably links these references and citations to their context in the article. 

Scrapers and parsers have historically had difficulties correctly parsing tables, references and citations, but Enterprise’s Structured Contents endpoint now provides an easy way to retrieve this information as reliable and ready-to-reuse JSON.

Quality scoring models. Data in wiki projects is being updated all the time, reflecting the highly dynamic nature of what’s happening in the world around us. When analysing this kind of data, it’s important to have metrics available that can give insight into its reliability and verifiability. Wikimedia Enterprise APIs now provide two new fields alongside its structured references: Reference Need and Reference Risk. A higher reference_need_score indicates a stronger need for sources in line with Wikipedia’s ‘verifiability’ policy. A higher reference_risk_score means there is more risk in the article, as the present references are considered less reliable. 

Python SDK. After releasing a Software Development Kit for Go in 2023, the Enterprise team has released and is maintaining an SDK for Python. Python is used widely for research and for machine learning applications by data scientists, data analysts, AI engineers, and more. This SDK aims to make it much easier to develop integrations with the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs using Python.

Want to learn more?

• Stay updated on new features and case studies on Enterprise’s news page.
• Enterprise’s history and how it works on the project FAQ page or specifically the operating and revenue principles.
• All governance documents and past reports

If you have any questions, please ask them to the project’s discussion page on Meta wiki.