Dear Internet Archive Community,
This year is a monumental year for the Internet Archive—our 25th Anniversary. With the support of our patrons, we’ve grown from a project archiving the Internet to a vast library that serves millions of people each year. Now more than ever before, we need your financial support to continue collecting, preserving, and sharing our digital cultural artifacts.
Here are a few examples of how your contributions impact our mission! Right now:
- We’re hosting 70 petabytes of data and counting
- The Wayback Machine is storing more than 475 billion webpages
- Readers around the world are browsing more than 28 million books and texts
- Music lovers, podcast listeners, Old Time Radio fans, and audiophiles have access to more than 14 million recordings
- Users are uploading more than 17,000 items per day
Over the next 25 years, we’ll face a very different set of challenges. We may not have achieved Universal Access to All Knowledge yet, but we still can. Over the next few decades, we can preserve writings from not a hundred million people, but from a billion people. We can have platforms and systems that are driven by altruism, not advertising models. We can have a world with many winners, where people participate, learn, and find new communities. I believe we can build this future together.
From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people. Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That’s why we don’t charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects.
A little goes a long way. For $20, we can acquire, digitize, and preserve a book forever. If everyone who uses the archive contributed just $5, we could continue offering these services for free and ad-free for years to come. If you find our site useful, please chip in!
Your support will help us build the web we deserve. Let’s be the builders and dreamers of the next twenty-five years.
Thank you for joining me.
Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian
Please make a tax-deductible donation now.
You will receive an email confirmation that can be used for your tax records.
The Internet Archive is a California non-profit charity that is tax-exempt under section 501c3 of the Internal Revenue Code. Federal Tax ID Number 94-3242767.
