Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

[Aachen]

Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads).

The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This looks more reasonable compared to an organisation like Mozilla. Other things that jump out are half a million in legal fees and 1.8M for fundraising. In total, 43M out of 49M expenses in 2018 went to "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me.

Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.

[malux85]

I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity?

Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?

[arzel]

Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.

[malux85]

Couldn't do 1k but I can do 200 right now, anything for these guys, they are doing amazing work, everyone give what you can!

[0_gravitas]

> the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education

I'm a deal past these periods in my life, and I did quite well via just arbitrary memorization, at the cost of never really developing an intuitive understanding, and therefore a true appreciation, for subjects like math. I've only recently started going through KA's courses, starting all the way back in Algebra.

[garraeth]

Just donated. This is one of the good sites on the web. Please lets keep this one going.

[dangoor]

Thank you so much!

[notduncansmith]

Thanks for setting a positive example. I’ve set up a monthly donation, so I’ll match yours today over the next 4+ years :)

[cerberusss]

Wow, that's very, very generous of you!

[inimino]

Kudos!

[elric]

If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as "suspicious", now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn't seem to implement 3DSecure. What's grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.

[avian]

Very likely Khan Academy can't help. Also your bank probably doesn't know why and neither does their fraud prevention service provider that runs some machine learning/AI system somewhere that decided to flag your transaction. At least that has been my experience in dealing with these things.

[dangoor]

Sorry to hear that. AFAIK, we just use Stripe, which is pretty standard.

[vasusen]

I had a similar experience now. Never had to do reCaptcha on a payment form with my phone before. And then the payment was rejected. I am a normal US credit card payer. I ended up using PayPal.

[dannysu]

I've been a fan of Khan Academy since they were just some Youtube videos.

You can find Khan Academy's past Form 990 online and I've been archiving them.

Sal Khan made:

2008: ? ($0 revenue)

2009: ?

2010: $70,833

2011: $348,879

2012: $348,529

2013: $348,292

2014: $548,116

2015: $800,000

2016: $815,000

2017: $785,000

2018: $824,000

You can see that, just like a startup, the sacrifice in the beginning as a founder is real. Before 2010 his salary from KA was probably 0 or significantly less. $70K in 2010 was less than my new grad salary. The jump in 2011 to $350K is around how much a senior makes in HCOL areas now. There has been basically no adjustment in his earning for 4 years from 2015 to 2018.

From the 990 forms, you can also get a sense of how much other people in the organization are being paid. I think all of them can command higher compensation elsewhere, but choose to work at KA because leveling the playing field for education is such a great mission.

Sal Khan's compensation as a CEO is only ~3.x times of many senior positions in the organization. Not outrageous at all.

In 2008's Form 990, Sal Khan wrote that KA is being used by 10,000 students daily. I don't know how many accounts, but growing from that to 71 million in 2018 is incredible. The impact to the world is undeniable.

[stupidcar]

Seems like governments should be funding Khan Academy during this period, since they are effectively replacing regular public education.

[malandrew]

If taxpayers could get vouchers for the money going to education, I'd send mine to KA instead of public schools. It would be money much better spent.

[throwaway13337]

I quite enjoyed khan academy when it was just Khan doing lectures. They were terrific.

I can't imagine, though, that servers should account for any sizable amount of overall expense. Is this really an issue for them? The linked page didn't seem to talk about it.

[kiba]

Khan Academy isn't just composed of only youtube lectures, but a sophisticated platform for doing math problems, computer programming education, and so forth.

[dirtydroog]

Why do you say that? In my company our cloud bill is the largest expense after salaries. We're constantly watching those costs as they can get out of control quite quickly

[warent]

It's a nonprofit organization. I'm not that educated on the topic but I think that means it's possible to find a breakdown of their expenses somewhere.

[djohnston]

i think the platform has evolved quite a bit over the past 5 years

[derision]

Cloud bills can be massively, especially for a company that has a ton of outgoing bandwidth

[dangoor]

It's our biggest expense after salaries, as noted elsewhere in the thread.

[karimf]

Here's the video of Sal Khan talking about the donations [0]. Not much additional information, aside that he said they were already running on deficit before this crisis.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjGERWYvzqk

[drewg123]

I was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page.

I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding servers, like reducing bitrate, or turning off "fancy" features?

[dangoor]

Video playing is mostly handled by YouTube.

Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online.

We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.

[robinhouston]

I’m a bit surprised it’s so little. Our servers are at something like 1000% of normal load. We’re a data visualisation company: naively I would have expected online education to be affected more than us, rather than less.

[ipsum2]

It helps that Khan Academy's videos are hosted on Youtube. I imagine thats a large chunk of the bandwidth.

[zylepe]

I’m curious how much internet usage is up in general. My site that people use to map running and walking routes is up about 2.5x as well since around March 16.

[kvz]

Went ahead and offered them our encoding service at cost-price

[discordance]

Worthy internet causes: Khan Academy, Wikipedia and Electronic Frontier Foundation

Any other suggestions?

[Aachen]

Note that Wikimedia has a huge income already. They're important and valuable, but if we're talking about who doesn't get enough publicity and donations, it's not Wikipedia/Wikimedia.

[insertnickname]

Internet Archive

[Vinnl]

OpenStreetMaps.

[keiferski]

"The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions."

https://publicdomainreview.org

[dillonmckay]

EPIC https://epic.org/

MAPS https://maps.org/

[alex_duf]

Time to use webtorrents to lower the bandwidth cost?

[gigatexal]

I donated what I could. They’re doing amazing work

[op03]

Would moving to torrents reduce the load? Kiwix seems to able to distribute offline wikipedia stackoverflow etc that way - https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

[Joe_Ewing]

As an educator, this service is an invaluable supplemental resource for my kids. Especially now. Just donated without hesitation. I hope you all consider doing the same if you have the means.

[Mandatum]

Please register Khan Academy in other jurisdictions so I can claim tax breaks. Specifically: UK, Australia and Canada.

Look to how Effective Altruism has setup its various entities around the world.

[11235813213455]

In the other way, there might be plenty businesses using too much energy for their current usages/load

[jason0597]

I gave them about 4 pounds, the videos did help me and I feel like I have to give something back

[polskibus]

Shouldn't they address public cloud owners for resources directly?

[Farfromthehood]

PornHub didn't ask for help. Just sayin'