With Wikipedia going through with its decision to shut down the site for 24 hours as part of their protest against SOPA, it’s received quite a bit of criticism in the process for the decision. The Next Web’s own Brad McCarty gave a pretty good argument for how Wikipedia could have used its site to raise awareness, in the same way it was able to raise money for its own cause.
Of course the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t have any revenue to speak of, but what if other sites had made the same decision? We’ve put together a list of some of the Web’s major sites and figured out approximately how much they stood to lose, based on their annual revenue, if they had followed in Wikipedia’s footsteps.
Google: According to Wired, in July, Google was making $3 billion a month in advertising, most of which comes in from the text ads you see on the page. That comes down to about $100 million per day if Google had done more than cover its logo.
Facebook: With predictions for Facebook’s revenue for 2011 standing at $4.27 billion, according to that number, if they closed shop for one day they would lose almost $11.7 million, and gain a ton of pretty pissed off Facebook users.
Twitter: With an annual revenue of about $140 million, Twitter’s one day loss would fall $20,000 short of $400,000, but then its users would have nowhere to go tocomplain about Twitter being down.
