A commercial site behind a knowledge project
In the early web, a portal could attract visitors with directories, search tools, and other online features, then make money by charging for access to some material. Bomis used that model, including premium adult content. That commercial side mattered because an ambitious online reference work needed more than an idea: it needed computers connected to the internet and enough capacity to serve readers.
The economics of getting Wikipedia online
Wikipedia’s early costs were practical and recurring. Each page request used server capacity; as more people read and edited pages, the project needed infrastructure that could keep up. Revenue from Bomis gave Jimmy Wales a way to cover some of those expenses while the encyclopedia was getting started, rather than relying only on donations from a readership that had yet to form.
This was a form of cross-subsidy: income from one part of a business paid for a separate project. It linked two very different kinds of web activity, but the connection was financial, not editorial. Bomis’s adult-content business helped underwrite the machinery that let Wikipedia’s freely accessible pages grow. The striking consequence is that a commercial web model helped pay for a resource designed to be open to everyone.
