Classroom Companion: Business

19.4 · Digital Business Models

---

298
19
though the content of Wikipedia is cre-
ated without any financial costs, there are 
costs of running the servers and for cover-
ing the salaries of Wikipedia’s employees 
(5). Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit 
organization, Wikimedia Foundation.
The SRM of Wikipedia is shown in 
.
Fig. 
19.11
. There are three stakehold-
ers: benefactors, writers, and readers. 
All three stakeholders have a relation-
ship to Wikipedia—the writers develop 
Wikipedia, the readers use Wikipedia, 
and the benefactors fund Wikipedia. 
There are no relationships between these 
stakeholders because:
5
The authors are anonymous.
5
Usually, several authors contrib-
ute to each article.
5
The readers may also take the 
role of watchdogs monitoring 
the quality of the content and, if 
necessary, correct it.
5
The benefactors contribute 
because of the quality and cor-
rectness of the encyclopedia and 
the importance the encyclopedia 
has on society at large.
Wikipedia is an example of a large digi-
tal service without any form of relation-
ships between the stakeholders. Hence, 
there are no significant network effects 
associated with the various actors in the 
business model.
The two main strategies of Wikipedia 
are to (1) develop and maintain a plat-
form that encourages writers to create 
and edit content and (2) to ensure that 
the content is relevant, correct, and 
important.
Wikipedia
Online encyclopeadia
Develop
Donations
Benefactors
Readers
Writers
. Fig. 19.11 Wikipedia modeled using the SRM. (Authors’ own figure)