The most controversial website of the year, or maybe the decade Wikileaks is undoubtedly worth a case study, the story of how its highly controversial founder started it and how and from where he gets his offensive content and how his site gained world wide popularity, like most other case studies on this blog we don’t have any proof or evidence to prove this, as this is just an assumption on how famous internet businesses could have started.

The most controversial website of the year, or maybe the decade Wikileaks is undoubtedly worth a case study, the story of how its highly controversial founder started it and how and from where he gets his offensive content and how his site gained world wide popularity, like most other case studies on this blog we don’t have any proof or evidence to prove this, as this is just an assumption on how famous internet businesses could have started.

Wikileaks started off in 2006 with a group of unknown internet activists, out of which only its spokesperson Julian Assange is known till now. Starting such a site is not that easy, its almost 10 times as tough as running it.
Firstly the content is not something you find all across the net, every piece of information on Wikileaks is unique and took a lot of research, this maybe easy for us bloggers who create one such article each week, but they released 10s of thousands of articles each month.

The initial content

So the first issue they had was the content, they would atleast need about 1000 articles to get the very first visitor, and as I mentioned above this content takes a lot of research, they have to contact people, find images and videos, hack into different systems and finally come up with a story that matters.
Moreover this had to be done a thousand times keeping security, society and the law in their minds, and however good your at it you cannot escape each and everytime, and maybe thats the reason why the other founders of Wikileaks haven’t yet revealed themselves.
But I’m damn sure that all of them had a clear idea of what they were doing and knew the net, technology and their niche extremely well.

This would have seemed very tough for you and me, but not for Julian Assange and his friends, Assange himself was a constant traveler, he had traveled across half a dozen countries before he was even 14, many of which had a controversial background, he was arrested for hacking when he was 14.
So he knew a hell lot about the codes he was writing and a lot about his niche as he had witnessed the different social injustices in many countries, more than what he saw it was the connections he left behind which helped him come up with the first few articles, and again Wikileaks has 9 Julian Assange’s and I bet almost all of them had a similar background.
Oh well!! when you know so much about something its easy to come up with a few articles on the topic, but these guys used their technical and social resources to get most of their information.

The first few visitors

Wikileaks was a unique site with very appealing and viral content, the only thing that would take to make it popular was a single press release, I single trigger would make it go extremely viral, but that didn’t happen for some reason.
Wikileaks had been active from 2006, but it gained mainstream fame only by the end of 2009. A few people had mistook that the site was born only in 2009, which even I wasn’t sure about.


The site did have traffic all this while, but that was very much lesser than its actual potential, sites like these can go viral from the very next day, seems to me that the Wikileak’s guys were technically very advanced, but lacked the marketing skills, moreover even I felt that Wikileaks isn’t promoting itself actively, either they are new to it or they are purposely avoiding it.

Funding : their first source of funding

Even when Wikileaks got started they had a hell lot of expenses, but they were funded by a few rich Chinese businessmen and powerful journalists most of who have not yet been identified.
Surely those funds won’t last for 4 years no matter how you control your expenses, I’m sure they encountered plenty of financial issues from day one, but they were all curbed due to their high profile friends and donors.
So for three years they ran without revenues which I hate about internet firms these days, and in the beginning of 2010 they started asking for donations from users, which worked out really well as they were running their business like an NGO. Less than 1% of their readers actually donated, but most of them who did gave huge donations.
I always had a feeling that Wikileaks was a website which could run on a low budget, and I bet many of you thought the same, but unfortunately their expenses could near any small mainstream news network.
They have claimed to have a 9 member advisory board and upto 20 others to support them in technical and data management jobs, surely this wouldn’t consume a lot of money, but I’m damn sure that 29 is not all they have, its just impossible to run such a site and publish so much content without a bit of external hands.

They do have 900 contributors, but this contributor section is filled with mediocre people like you and me, who can just write, edit and copy and not research and find information, so these guys are in their chatroom were they find and talk people who have come with the news, but that is not what scientific journalism is about.
I believe Wikileaks has got its main sources doing field work in controversial places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, field work meaning insider information, spying and even hacking, most of them are locals in their respective countries, surely this wouldn’t come cheap, thats the main reason why they keep getting into so much of financial issues even when their are millions flowing in as donations each month.
Online and private donations is the only source of revenue and their is no other source which could be useful, they cannot monetize themselves with advertisements as their content is illegal and against the rules of many countries, neither can they sell premium news like any other news agency as the main idea behind this is freedom of speech.

Explanation of the scientific journalism

Honestly speaking I had no idea on what this was until recently when it got popular, and I bet most of you guys too have no idea on this as even Wikipedia didn’t give me the accurate answer.
The term was introduced by Assange himself, and it spreadt like wildfire after that, he did not tell more than a sentence in a media coverage, but that got extremely popular and all media entities started to right about it. So most of the meanings for the term was created by the various media channels.
But I’m sure that Wikileaks has given birth to a new journalism, no matter what the description others say, I’d say that scientific journalism is fetching information and news while going against terms, rules and violations, yes it is illegal journalism.
Today most journalists cover news which they are allowed to see, which are shown by the government and they make and they can’t make any effort to go beyond that.
This is what Wikileaks is different as they find news through hack attacks, spying, stealing and even bribing at times, they have a huge chatroom or I can say forum where people who want to report news come up to and then the scientific journalism takes place to learn the truth, the false and the whole story.

The main driving force behind Wikileaks is the community and thats actually their main source for information, but they use the community to report news, whereas the story is created by them, maybe thats why they burn so much cash, they are in need of man-power and technical resources.

Rise to mainstream fame – Takeoff stage

Wikileaks got really popular, though it took time they were running really well, but even though everybody knew about them, nobody spoke about them, this is a marketing defect which is seen in many companies worldwide.
Slowly they got viral on social media which was surely going to make it to big online publications such as Mashable and Techcrunch and maybe that is when they finally decided to market themselves and a press release would have been the first plan, press releases for such sites go extremely viral and would have surely caught the attention of publications such as The New York Times, and one endorsement there would surely trigger a chain.

After this their fame didn’t stop, they kept making controversial releases and they made sure they are well promoted, more than that they made sure that all their reports had enough elements to make them entertaining and controversial and thats what matters for a business entering into this stage.
When they reached this they were all over the news world-wide and what drove them more further was the various politicians and celebrities making both positive and negative comments on them, no matter what the Federal Government said Wikileaks kept growing its loyal followership.
This huge followership surely helped them build a community of donors and the long awaited revenue, but they must have been cautious of not doing anything against the law as during this time most of the world’s governments were against them.
On to our readers
Wikileaks was surely a grand success, let me rephrase that, Wikileaks will surely be a grand success, the site had and still has a lot of potential, but sadly its not being used to the limit. In this post my main aim was to deliver the business and marketing end of the Wikileaks saga and I’m sure I did my best, as I’ve mentioned in the beginning all the information here is through assumptions backed by thorough research, but surely I cannot provide you with the evidence to back this.