Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2022-2023/draft/Archives/2022-05

Wikimedia Enterprise Profit

Hello,

at June 9 there will be a Office Hour about the Wikimedia Enterprise API and I think that it is important to talk about how many profit should the Wikimedia LLC the company that runs Wikimedia Enterprise make as maximum. I think that more than 25 percent profit are not responsible. So this means that the revenue should be not more than 25 percent higher than the expenses. The answer in the FAQ of the Wikimedia Enterprise API writes that the expected revenue in 2021-2022 will be 10.2 Million Dollars and the expenses will be 3.6 Million Dollars. So the difference between these two that is after my understanding the profit. In this case it are 6.6 Million Dollars or 64.71 percent according to the prediction. I dont know the real numbers. This is a much to high expected profit from my point of view. What do you think about that. I am interested in hearing thougths about that and write it here to hopefully reach more people after it is an important question. Last year I havent read much about that question during annual plan conversations. There the business was not yet running full and so this can be a explanation why there was no interest to talk about predicted numbers.--Hogü-456 (talk) 20:32, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

For the benefit of those who are not already following the talkpage of the Enterprise project, this issue has been raised and is discussed here: Talk:Wikimedia_Enterprise#Revenue_goal. An excerpt of the relevant reply, already published there, is this:

...the “how much money will this raise” question on the FAQ has this note: As per the project's financial goals that were initially defined during the development-phase, the 2021-22 Annual Plan predicts "$10.2 million in contractual revenue and approximately $3.6 million in expense for Wikimedia Enterprise...". As this sentence implies - this is the assumption that was made early in the development of the project. Now that we are a further year ahead, things are becoming clearer - and consequently so is potential customer base. The most important thing is that we generate, as you said yourself, sufficient revenue such that Enterprise’s activities are self-funding - but not too much as to alter our fundamental focus on small-donations. Next month will also be the next public milestone and associated announcement, which will have details that answer some of your questions in this topic. ​​As per the project’s published Principles, we will also be publishing overall revenues and expenses at least annually - but that won’t be until there’s approximately a year’s worth of financial data to report upon. As things stand, we’ve only been “open for business” since January. The publication of the first full year’s worth of revenue/expenses will include more practical information, rather than the necessarily-hypothetical response I can give today.

Also, as mentioned here, there will be an "office hour" meeting (public Q&A with the Enterprise staff soon: Thursday 9 June @ 1700 UTC on Zoom. Please join us.

LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 09:52, 23 May 2022 (UTC)