Annual Report 2022

Summary

Letter from the CEO

The year 2022 was overall a good year for World History Encyclopedia. We managed to recover from the reduction in visitors that we had suffered due to the change of domain name from ancient.eu to worldhistory.org as part of our rebranding the year before.

We reached a new record of 72 million page views in the year, up from previously 60 million. As a number, that is hard to comprehend or to put into any sort of perspective. What fills me with joy is that so many millions of people all around the world are able to learn about history, entirely for free. Now increasingly also in their own native language, with around 24% of these page views being read in a language other than English.

The team has been busy this year! Our editorial team published 507 texts on the encyclopedia (definitions, articles, book reviews, teaching materials and collections), which is more than in any year before. Our video team produced no less than 100 videos throughout the year, growing our YouTube channel's subscribers from 29,000 to 61,000. We've also had great success with maps produced by our in-house cartographer, some of which went rather viral.

A huge thank you to the World History Encyclopedia team and all of the hundreds of volunteers who are making this possible! I also wish to extend a huge thank you to all our members and donors. Without your unwavering support we would not be able to help millions of people to learn about history entirely for free. Thank you!

Keep reading below for more details...


Best wishes,


Jan van der Crabben

CEO

Statistics

40 Million Readers

We had over 40 million readers from all over the world who read over 72 million pages on our website. This is a 20% increase compared to our previous record. Over 24% of these page views were in a language other than English, meaning our international reach has grown significantly.

11 Employees

The number of paid employees went up from eight to eleven in the year 2022. We invested primarily in content production this year, with two new staff writers and one new editor for our members magazine.


41 Languages

We have now published over 5,000 article translations into a grand total of 41 languages. Our translation team has grown significantly, with two employees and around a hundred volunteer translators from all over the world. 



3,506 Articles

Our authors and editors published 507 new texts on the website, a new record. More and more contributors are joining us, especially in the translation department. We also have two new staff writers!

Highlights

Internship Programme with the University of Groningen

We successfully ran a six-month internship programme with the University of Groningen as part of their MA course in Classics and Ancient Civilizations. The intern Thanos worked for over 280 hours with our team across multiple departments, including the following activities:

Google Ad Grant

World History Encyclopedia is now part of the Google for Nonprofits programme, through our Canadian branch World History Foundation / Fondation de l'Histoire du Monde.

As part of the Google for Non-Profits Programme, Google now generously provides us with $10,000 USD in credit to spend on advertising our website on Google Search. This will allow us to reach a greater audience than before, especially in languages such as French and Spanish where our online presence is less established than in English.

We have teamed up with Cause Inspired Media to manage this budget and optimize it, as they are a company specialized in managing precisely this kind of advertising for non-profit organizations such as ours.

We thank Google for their generous support!

Frequently Asked Questions

The translation department and its countless volunteer translators have toiled throughout the year to arrive at 8,000 translated articles across 41 languages. This is an amazing achievement in itself!


As a result, we have seen that an increasing number of our readers come from countries that are not English-speaking. At the time of writing, around a third of our visitors read our encyclopedia in a language other than English. We are very excited about this, as it shows how important it is to provide people with resources in their own language if we want to continue working towards our mission of improving history education worldwide. 

Help Us Grow

You can support our non-profit organization by becoming a member, giving a donation or by volunteering with us.