Why Wikipedia's Business Model is so successful?

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that, by default, allows its users to edit any article. Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet.

Social impact: self-transcendence

Life changing: self-actualization, affiliation/belonging

Emotional: badge value, provides access, nostalgia, design/aesthetics

Functional: informs, simplifies, reduces effort, organizes, integrates, variety, quality, saves time, avoids hassles

Community-funded:

The critical resource in this business strategy is a community's intellect. Three distinct consumer groups comprise this multifaceted business model: believers, suppliers, and purchasers. First, believers join the online community platform and contribute to the production of goods by vendors. Second, buyers purchase these goods, which may be visual, aural, or literary in nature. Finally, believers may be purchasers or providers, and vice versa.

Crowdsourcing:

Crowdsourcing is a kind of sourcing in which people or organizations solicit donations from Internet users to acquire required services or ideas. Crowdsourcing differs from outsourcing because work may originate from an undefined public (rather than being commissioned from a particular, identified organization). In addition, those crowdsourcing procedures are a combination of bottom-up and top-down. The benefits of crowdsourcing may include reduced prices, increased speed, better quality, increased flexibility, scalability, and variety. An anonymous crowd adopts a solution to a task or issue, usually through the internet. Contributors are compensated or have the opportunity to win a prize if their answer is selected for manufacturing or sale. Customer engagement and inclusion may help build a good rapport with them, resulting in increased sales and income.

Culture is brand:

It requires workers to live brand values to solve issues, make internal choices, and provide a branded consumer. Developing a distinctive and enduring cultural brand is the advertising industry's holy grail. Utilizing the hazy combination of time, attitude, and emotion to identify and replicate an ideology is near to marketing magic.

Digitization:

This pattern is based on the capacity to convert current goods or services into digital versions, which have several benefits over intangible products, including increased accessibility and speed of distribution. In an ideal world, the digitalization of a product or service would occur without compromising the consumer value proposition. In other words, efficiency and multiplication achieved via digitalization do not detract from the consumer's perceived value. Being digitally sustainable encompasses all aspects of sustaining the institutional framework for developing and maintaining digital objects and resources and ensuring their long-term survival.

Donationware:

Donationware is a software license arrangement that provides users with fully functional, unrestricted software in exchange for an optional contribution to the creator or a third-party beneficiary (usually a non-profit). The author may optionally specify the amount of the assistance, or it may be left to the user's choice, depending on their subjective assessment of the software's worth.

Nonprofit organization:

The nonprofit world rarely engages in equally clear and succinct conversations about an organization’s long-term funding strategy. It works on funds and provides services to the user free of cost. That is because the different types of funding that fuel nonprofits have never been clearly defined. A nonprofit organization is often dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a particular point of view. In economic terms, a nonprofit organization uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's shareholders (or equivalents) as profit or dividends.

Open-source:

Compared to more centralized development methods, such as those usually employed by commercial software firms, the open-source model is more decentralized. Scientists see the open-source approach as an example of collaborative openness. Peer production is a fundamental concept of open-source software development, with deliverables such as source code, blueprints, and documentation made freely accessible to the public. The open-source software movement started as a reaction to the constraints imposed by proprietary programming. Since then, its ideas have extended to other areas, resulting in what is known as open cooperation. Typically, money is generated via services that complement the product, such as advising and maintenance.

Pay what you want:

Pay what you want is a pricing approach in which purchasers determine the value of a service or a product. Allowing customers to pay whatever they want may benefit certain circumstances since it removes a slew of drawbacks associated with traditional pricing. For example, permission to pay whatever they want attracts buyers for a variety of reasons, including eliminating the worry of whether a product is worth a fixed price and the associated danger of disappointment (buyer's remorse). For sellers, this eliminates the time-consuming and often expensive process of establishing the correct pricing (which may vary for different market segments).

Selling of branded merchandise:

Merchandising, in the broadest definition, is any activity that helps sell goods to a retail customer. At the retail in-store level, merchandising refers to the range of goods offered for sale and the presentation of those products in a manner that piques consumers' attention and encourages them to make a purchase. Like the Mozilla Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation, specific open-source organizations offer branded goods such as t-shirts and coffee mugs. This may also be seen as an added service to the user community.