Annual Report 2024

The year 2024 marked a turning point for World History Encyclopedia. After the challenging economic climate of 2023, we not only recovered but achieved record-breaking growth across nearly every metric.

We reached an extraordinary milestone with 89 million page views, which is a 21% increase compared to the previous year. This represents our highest readership ever and demonstrates the growing hunger for reliable, accessible historical content in our increasingly complex world.

Our commitment to making history accessible globally continued to bear fruit. We published 2,386 new translations in 2024, bringing our content to even more readers worldwide. Our international readership remains strong, with 36% of our visitors reading in languages other than English. Spanish continues to be our largest non-English audience at 23%, followed by French at 4.5% and Turkish at 1.8%.

The editorial team published 360 new definitions and articles alongside 1,142 new images, covering diverse topics from the American Revolution and Native American cultures to crucial World War II campaigns including D-Day and the Battle of Britain. We further added 55 book reviews, providing our community with multiple ways to engage with history.

Our visual content proved particularly popular, with our top three most-viewed items all being image galleries. The gallery of 20 Frescoes from Pompeii alone attracted nearly 890,000 page views, followed by our Renaissance Paintings collection with 568,000 views and our Indus Valley Civilization gallery with 453,000 views. This underscores the power of visual storytelling in making history come alive.

We also produced 6 new teaching resources, furthering our mission to support educators worldwide. These materials, combined with our extensive article library and multimedia content, continue to serve teachers and students in classrooms around the globe.

In terms of revenue, we decided to hand over our advertising to Raptive. They now fully manage advertising on our website and find buyers at advertising agencies and exchanges for us. Our revenue per visitor more than doubled as a result, providing us with a strong foundation to face the headwinds of artificial intelligence in the coming years.

None of this would be possible without our incredible team of contributors, translators, and volunteers, as well as our loyal members and donors. Your support enables us to maintain our commitment to providing high-quality, historical content to millions of learners worldwide.

Thank you for being part of our mission to engage people with cultural heritage and improve history education worldwide.

Keep reading below for more details...

Best wishes,

Jan van der Crabben
CEO & Founder