Internet Archive Triples Your Donation to Keep 210 Petabytes of Knowledge Online
Keep Our Servers Running: Your Recurring Donation Goes 3X This September
The Internet Archive, home to the Wayback Machine and a vast digital library, is launching a September campaign where new recurring donations of $25 or more are matched 2:1, tripling the initial gift. The nonprofit, which provides free access to 210 petabytes of knowledge without ads or selling user data, relies on donations averaging $25 to maintain its independent infrastructure. This match aims to secure the servers, storage, and staff needed to sustain its mission of universal access to all knowledge.
Universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp. Our job is to put the best our world has to offer within the reach of our children.
- theletterf
Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.
- klamann
Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).
- esskay
I'm quite surprised they havent also adopted a high paying sponsorship model. If they had something and large hosting providers were pressured into sponsoring them by customers they'd have no funding issues.
Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!
- zetanor
I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".
I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?
- Cider9986
THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough.
It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well.
https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate
When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...
- pm90
It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).
- arjie
I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.
- totalconfusion
Who's paying?