Evidence from related fields like free software downloads similarly suggests that you’re lucky if a fraction of 1% converts to a paying customer. Or take Wikipedia. ClickZ claimed they had 189 million unique visitors in January 2007, and I’ve seen estimates that they get 7 Billion page views a month, yet their recent request for donations, which appears as an ad at the top of every article, has so far resulted in little more than 33,000 donations. (Just check the header of any Wikipedia article for the current tally.)

[via O’Reilly Radar]

I’ve been wondering about that. Although mostly I wonder how many people even donate content to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages. As of today, there are 2,117,623 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics).

[via Wikipedia: about]

You can try and see if you have time to make anything of the data here. I’d guess that there are 100 or 1000 times as many happy takers of free content as there are givers.

Does Wikipedia deserve some help in maintaining this service? Absolutely. Will the users who take advantage of the free content contribute? I wonder.