Mark Graham

Electricity and heat and all the rest of that. Well, I should say, if you come and visit our operation in San Francisco, which you should do sometimes if you haven't, we have several physical locations. We have physical archives in different locations in the United States and also in Canada. But our headquarters building is an old church, a former church of Christian scientists.

and now it's a temple for knowledge. When you come into our building, you'll see how frugal we are. We've kind of left it the way it was when it was a regular kind of church. We don't have air conditioning or our backup generators or anything like that, but we have a lot of hard drives in racks, and we do have some fans.

When it's a hot day here in San Francisco, we open up the windows and ventilate that. Also, people who use the service may know that sometimes we'll go down if the power goes out. We'll be down for a little while, but we're a library. It's okay. We'll be back. The material itself is stored in multiple locations, so it's safe.

Last year, I think we spent probably about $28 million, and I think I'd divide that into three buckets. The first bucket would be earned income, program-related business activity, they say, in the nonprofit world. This is work that we do on behalf of museums and governments and libraries and the like. when they pay us primarily to do web archiving on their behalf or do book digitization.

Another third comes from a very loyal collection of more than 150,000 people who donate money to us every year. A growing number of them are monthly donors, so we're very appreciative of the folks who give us $10, $20, $30 a month. And then the final third comes from a combination of high wealth individuals and foundations.

It's diversifying. We're certainly looking at ways to continue to diversify it. The monthly donor program is certainly an area that is growing for us. And just, you know, as more and more people use our service and depend on it, frankly, and see the value of it, then more and more of them support us every year so that the number of unique annual donors has been increasing.

on a fairly consistent basis, and we very much appreciate that. It allows us to do what we do. It is only through the support that we get from our patrons that we're able to continue to work diligently and creatively to try to preserve our world cultural heritage.

We haven't built a full-text index on the entire holdings of the Wayback Machine, maybe someday, but for now we kind of do it on a case-by-case basis.

But there's other dimensions, though, of this evolving digital world that we live in that are representing new challenges and new opportunities. Issues like hyper-personalization. The web you experience is different than the web I experience. Even down to a given web page, what you see and what I see may be different because of

geography or browser type or what that website knows about us as individuals, our age or our preferences, et cetera. And I'm not just talking about the ads either. You know, this is elements of it. So hyper-personalization is one thing. The splinterization of the net often around geopolitical boundaries where large parts of the internet are just not accessible to other parts of the internet.

Certainly we all know about the great firewall of China where But there are many, many other examples of that. When Russia invaded Ukraine, many thousands of websites that had traditionally been available from Russia in the West are no longer available. And then there's the evolution of what we think of as the internet into the web.

And now it's this kind of like mobile first kind of environment with apps and apps to their own kind of special hell of walled garden content. For a variety of ways, it's very bound technically and often administratively with IDs and passwords and paywalls and all the rest of that. So getting material out of these containers that we think of as apps that live on our phones is challenging.

No. We have some archives from some YouTube videos, but you just threw out a number like three or four million a day, like nothing near that. This goes to also like, why do we archive what we archive and how do we make choices? And the answer in short is there are more than 10,000 different reasons why a given URL may be archived by the Wayback Machine at any given day.

And they are in part selected by the more than 1,000 partners that we have that are primarily librarians that do curation of material that they think should be archived. So we have partnerships with them. We have partnerships with CloudFlare, an infrastructure provider, with WordPress, with Wikipedia. We also offer a service called Save Page Now.

I would say the Instagram is the web, but I would say it's not necessarily the public web because generally speaking, material from Instagram, Facebook, and threads, they're basically the meta properties are not very accessible unless you have an ID and a password on those services. Even the so-called public pages have limitations for how one can access them. So there are special cases.

We work hard to archive things that people think they want to preserve in some fashion. And so a lot of material on some of these social platforms are archived by patrons who enter URLs into the Wayback Machine.

It absolutely is making some of the work that we do more challenging. But I actually think there's larger implications here. It's hurting our democracy. It's hurting our culture. It's hurting our ability to have shared conversations and shared understandings of the world. that we live in. But this isn't necessarily a technical thing too, because we can make choices.

I can watch one TV channel and you can watch another, and we get radically different worldviews. But in those cases, we have choices at least, and we can flip between one and the other. If the switching cost is higher, where it's a paywall, for example, and where the switching cost is an actual dollar sign cost, then

Can I afford to pay for the 30 or 40 different news sources that I would like to have access to as an informed citizen? Is a real cost associated with that or the cost of using this app or that app and not be able to bring this material together and aggregate it? So the issue that you're addressing, I think, is one of the critical issues of our times.

And yes, certainly it affects the work that we do here as archivists, but I think it has much broader and profound social implications. There's a lot of material that's publicly available. I keep using this phrase public web, and I'm making a distinction here. Things you can get to without an ID and a password.