Summary
This is the third annual financial report for Wikimedia Enterprise – for the fiscal year 2023-24.1 During this period, both annual revenue and expenses increased slightly compared to the previous annual report, to $3.4M and $3.8M respectively. The net operating loss of $400k resulted from small shifts in contract signing periods, which registered additional revenue in the first months of fiscal year 2024-2025 instead of the final quarter of 2023-2024. We are pleased to share that projections for fiscal year 2024-2025 show that revenue from new customer contracts are likely to both exceed projected expenses and repay the initial investment from previous fiscal years.
Other technical developments during this reporting period are summarized at the end of this report. This notably includes enhanced free API accounts and “structured contents” in the Snapshot API.
Context
Wikimedia Enterprise provides enterprise-grade APIs for high-volume reusers of Wikimedia content (see original Diff post announcing the project). Wikimedia Enterprise’s services generate 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. Wikimedia Enterprise’s creation was consistent with the recommendations from the 2030 movement strategy process to increase the sustainability of the broader Wikimedia movement and to improve the user experience on the Wikimedia projects.
Wikimedia Enterprise represents a small part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s overall revenue strategy, which is still heavily powered by small donations from individual donors looking to protect the future of the free knowledge ecosystem. This report is being released as an offshoot of the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2023-2024 audit report, which outlines the full picture of the Foundation’s revenue and expenses.
Revenue
During fiscal year (FY) 2023-2024, total revenue for Wikimedia Enterprise was $3.4 million – representing 1.8% of the Wikimedia Foundation’s total revenue for the period and up slightly from $3.2M in FY 2022-2023. This revenue is also reported within the 2023-24 Wikimedia Foundation audit report.2 Increasing revenue from Enterprise was in line with our fiscal year 2023-2024 Annual Plan goal and consistent with the Movement Strategy recommendation to diversify revenue streams in order to support the future sustainability of the movement. While this revenue stream diversification fell slightly short of the 2023-2024 Annual Plan goal, we believe we are still on track over the medium-term: Enterprise contracts have already increased $400K year over year in monthly revenue so far in FY 2024-2025. We also anticipate further revenue in that period from other new commercial customers. Both will be accounted for in the next financial report.
Expenses
Total Wikimedia Enterprise expenses (including cost of services) during FY 2023-2024 were $3.8 million, down slightly from $4.0 million in FY 2022-2023.
Compared to the previous Wikimedia Enterprise financial report, we made some changes to the team structure to align better to our clients’ needs: building up internal engineering and customer experience staff (increasing our staffing costs), while simultaneously decreasing reliance on external service and customer support (decreasing our contractor costs).
Additionally, Wikimedia Enterprise began owing federal taxes in FY 2023-2024, as our previous balance of net operating losses has been used (please see our previous report for a more detailed explanation on our taxation structure). Note that FY 2022-2023 included a one-time accounting expense of $463 thousand to impair previously capitalized software development costs which was not repeated in FY 2023-2024.
A breakdown of expenses by type are shown in the table below.
Financial performance detail for FY 2023-2024 and FY 2022-2023
| $ thousands | FY 23-24 | FY 22-23 |
| Revenue (Subscription & Prof. Services) | $3,351 | $3,220 |
| Cost of Services | $839 | $1,446 |
| Internet Hosting Charges | $320 | $261 |
| Software Amortization | $432 | $757 |
| Customer Support | $87 | $428 |
| Gross Profits | $2,512 | $1,774 |
| Operating Expenses | $2,919 | $2,531 |
| Staffing Costs | $1,751 | $1,196 |
| Prof. Services and Contractors | $565 | $722 |
| Other Operating Expenses (Incl. 15% Overhead Charge) | $602 | $613 |
| Net Profit (Loss) Before Tax | -$407 | -$756 |
| Income Tax | 25.2 | 0 |
| Net Profit (Loss) | -$432 | -$756 |
Since inception in January 2022, Wikimedia Enterprise has netted a loss of $3.2M through June 2024. While we anticipated FY 2023-2024 to be the first year of Enterprise profitability, the contract schedule shifted slightly, registering the profit expected for FY 2023-2024 to instead fall into FY 2024-2025. With $1.9M already earned and a number of other contracts under negotiation, we are forecasting a total revenue of $8M, or $3.5M in net profits for FY 2024-2025, which would thereby repay the investment cost from previous years as well.
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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:
Enhanced Free API Accounts: users can now make 5,000 on-demand API requests a month at no cost, compared to the previous free-access limit of 10,000 queries.. Credits refresh on the 1st of every month, allowing continuous use of the APIs, including access to the Structured Contents articles endpoint. For bulk data users, the frequency of the Snapshot API updates has now doubled – new snapshots are published on the 2nd and 21st of each month.
Structured Contents in Snapshot API beta release: we are now providing a new dataset of several language editions of Wikipedia in a structured form. This is helpful for a wide variety of tasks, including all phases of model development for machine learning models, from pre-training to alignment, fine-tuning, updating/RAG as well as testing/benchmarking. This first release of the structured dataset includes parsed Wikipedia articles outputted as structured JSON files (NDJSON format compressed in tar.gz), with a consistent schema. Alongside this, the dataset has been published on Hugging Face containing all articles of the English and French language editions of Wikipedia, pre-parsed and outputted as structured JSON files using a consistent schema. Each object holds the content of one full Wikipedia article stripped of extra markdown and non-prose sections (references, etc.).
Want to learn more?
- Stay updated on new features and case studies on Enterprise’s news page enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog.
- Read more about Enterprise’s history and how it works on the project FAQ page
- Read about Enterprise’s operating and revenue principles
- Review https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise
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