MetaBrainz Foundation Annual Report for 2007

(Yes, this report is a year late — I had spent a lot of time on the annual report for 2006 and got so little feedback on it that I assumed no one cared. But now in 2008 I’ve been getting many more requests, so I’ve gone back and with the help of Pavan compiled the stats for 2007.)

Profit & Loss

In 2007 the foundation took in $89,645.59 and spent $64,543.84 for a total profit of $25,101.75. (non-profits can still earn a profit, but that profit must be reinvested into the company, not paid out to its officers and directors.) A detailed break down of where the income came from and where it went to is shown below:

Income

Expense

This Profit & Loss shows:

• It cost $12,972.06 to host MusicBrainz in 2007 — this includes hardware and hosting costs.
• PayPal donations, which represent end-user support for MusicBrainz, came to $14,575.59, 16.3% of our total income. The Foundation aims to have end-user donations pay for the actual cost of running the service and the end-users did in fact pay for slightly more than what it cost to host MusicBrainz in 2007!
• As it is with a lot of companies, salaries accounted for the largest slice of expenses. The Foundation paid $39,500 in salaries to Robert Kaye in 2007, which was still far below a reasonable salary level for an Engineer/Executive Director in California.
• $32,240.47 was earned licensing the MusicBrainz data for commercial use, which represents 40% of the total income.

In 2007 the foundation spent $12,972.06 on hosting and hardware costs and served out 725 million web hits and 386 million web service hits. Calculating a cost per hit, we find that we spent $17.89 per one million web hits and $33.58 per one million web service hits. These values are up slightly from the 2006 values of $17.56 and $30.58 respectively.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet for the end of 2007 showed the MetaBrainz Foundation with $14,323.45 retained earnings, a net income of $25,101.75 and total cash assets of $39,525.20.

Traffic

The following chart shows our traffic growth for 2007 and 2008:

The blue line represents the overall number of hits to musicbrainz.org. The red line shows how many of the overall hits were web service (API) hits; as you can see towards the end of 2007 half of our overall hits were web service hits.

Top data contributors

Top editors:

Top voters:

A big thank you to all of the editors/voters who contributed!