It is always important to understand the question before attempting it. So I would like to start with understanding it before proceeding.

What do you mean by Monetize? Is it to make some revenue or Profits? Revenue.

Do we have a particular choice of place and device in mind? No, you’re the % PM. It’s your choice.

How is the performance of the Product? especially the Churn aspect? The Product health is as usual good. However, the Money aspect is what is missing for us. It is getting more and more costly to run the service like we use to do.

Oh, OK!

Do we have a time frame and a particular target for the revenue? Nothing so far.

Thanks for the above clarity. Would like to share my understanding about the product and then proceed to the next steps.

So, Wikipedia is one of the online medium that people use to know more about anything that they wish to. Right from movies, art forms to Games, Science Topics to Gods and Beliefs. Everything has an aswer, definition and loads of info on Wikipedia. It is more of a  open-source information that anybody can access and edit as well provided one has an email id and internet access. The name is so used to people that it is even used in everyday basis to describe people  who are up to date with a lots of things. Thus, in short the product is doing great and helping information be shared as a service. One important reasons for this to be famous is because of it’s service as free.

Hope this makes sense and I have been able to share my understanding of the product. Yeah.

So, as a next step I would like to think of various source of monetization that Wikipedia can make use of to earn more. Post that would like to do an analysis on how effective is the solution on a long term using factors like Impact Size, Allignment to what Wikipedia is known for. Finally, will come up with one final answer.

• Subscription Based Model- Similar to Medium one can limit the no. of articles that one can read through from Wikipedia per month and post that one has to pay a certain amount to get access to it
  • One major factor to mention here is that Medium has profiles and based on that and other metrics that measures the quality of answer few are starred and medium has a limit on only those. While in Wikipedia we dont have anything like that.
  • So, we can make sure to have this number either constant across genres of articles and get users pay us or Could Make few resources as premium ones and charge only for that.
• Ad based Model- we can place related ads in the webpages that are related to articles. We can earn through a combination of Click Through Model, and price on # of Impression to get us our Revenue
  • One important factor is to make sure that the ads are highly related to articels being read and as well as not too much in a single webpage.
  • We should strictly avoid using ads on offers of different firms randomly as the Goal and Mission has always been to help people find relevant information and not to be a Advertising Column.
  • No matter how much the ads are related, It is always a friction point in the users journey. So need to make sure that things are calculated in well advance
• Patreon Method- We can ask the users to donate funds to their capacity to help us in continuing our service throughout every time they land on a webpage using popups and posters at the side of the page.

From the above discussion it is pretty obvious that the 1st idea is not somehting that we can choose. While, the second & third have their pros and cons to it and as well as give us our results in a way as well.

So from the 2nd and 3rd  I would like to go with the 2nd as that will help users get more information on other resources and get to experience and learn things more. This will also give us a huge impact that and help us stay sustainable.

So to summarize, Patreon model though helps users in a great deal will not be sufficient for us make our existence a questionable thing. While the 2nd idea will both help us stay alive and as well as help users know more.  One important note to be made is that though ads are shown, it must be in a way that it adds on to the knowledge that a user gets from Wikipedia and not some random ads on offers at Zomato, Movie tickets.

1. Questions?
   1. Why do we want to?
   2. What is the vision?
2. Users
   1. Students
   2. Academicians
   3. Parents
   4. Teachers
   5. Professionals
3. Target: Students, Parents and Teachers
4. Why do they use Wiki
   1. To search a content or information: Projects or Assignments
   2. To validate an information: Research or Correction
5. Pain Points
   1. Information may not be valid
   2. Real time collaboration with the source of truth or writer
   3. Collaboration with others accessing the content
6. Solutions
   1. Getting Live session with the writers based on payments: Having a Q&A session
   2. Paid internal wiki for educational institutes: Education Institute can keep the content Public or Private. And internal stakeholders like teachers and professors can update the content, students can keep a repository of projects that can be used by other students. The projects and assignments can be shared with parents.

First the question would be to understand if the understanding of the product is correct . Wikipedia is a free community sourced encyclopedia that offers all information under the sun. Apart from that it offers free books, travel guides as well as course materials. But for the scope of this question, I am assuming we are restricted to the encyclopedia .

Understanding the users and pain points.

1 . Researchers who are writing a paper or researching a topic .

2. Students who need help with an assignment or homework

3. Teachers who prepare lesson plans

4. Casual users who wish to find out about a topic .

5.  People who are passionate about certain topics or communities like sports lovers, entertainment buffs, etc

Pain Points:

1. Since it’s community sourced, the article might be factually incorrect .

2.  Instead of information on a topic, might need help with an answer or verification of a fellow researcher.

Probable Revenue Sources:

1.  Expert Series: Engaging key influencers to write content on a topic on a subscription basis .

2 . Answer a question: Get credits for answering a question or buy for getting it answered .

3.  Research paper services: Take help of fellow researchers on giving you feedback on a paper .

I think of the three, the first one is the best on, as for others you have alternatives in place.