There are some of the nonprofit websites which are non-commercial but have made a huge impact on the web. Three of them are given below:
When it’s about Web,then most of the services we use comes for FREE(for consumers),be it e-mail,messenger,web space,website building tools,music,videos,information,e-books,softwares and endless stuff like that.
But almost all the service providers have their own ways of earning out of the FREE services they facilitate.Plenty of service providers on the web are encashing tens of millions of dollars out of their web based businesses.
But still,there exists a plethora of web services which are ‘free to use’ and do not monetize their services at all.And few of them have made a huge impact on web population and the internet as a whole.
So, here are those three elite web entities which you can’t really avoid using…
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Wikipedia
There’s hardly any encouraging sales for Britannica or Encarta anymore as Wikipedia h
as established itself as the world’s richest(in terms of content) and FREE encyclopedia with over 10 million articles under its belt.It’s a multilingual information resource which is fueled by volunteers all over the world.
Started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001,it took just 7 years for Wikipedia to become the most popular information resource on the web.However,it accounts for billions of pageviews every month but doesn’t display any kind of ads on the site (donations help run this website).
However,the site can’t be assumed to be always correct(as any anonymous user can edit wiki articles) but still,around 90% of the content is reliable and reference based.
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Mozilla Firefox
Internet explorer has been facing a constant downfall since the launch of Mozilla Firefox (November 
29,2005) and by far,three versions of Firefox have been released.The latest version(3rd),which released on June 17,2008 created a Guinness World Record by clocking 8 million unique downloads on the first day of its release.
Although ‘browser market‘ is tough to breathe with too many competitors(latest being ‘Chrome’ by Google) involved in it,giving a lot of options for the users to hop upon,Firefox has outperformed even IE(internet explorer) and all other competitors,becoming the most widely used web browser on the web.
Firefox doesn’t monetize its services as such.It basically runs on donations and is also tied up in a contract with Google which fetches it a good sum of money to take care of current maintenance and future growth of the service.
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Craigslist
It’s a web entity which serves as a FREE online classifieds portal. Its sole earning source is paid job ads in selected cities in the U.S. Only to maintain its 24 member staff, servers and other maintenance expenses.
However,Craigslist was incorporated as a for-profit in 1999(initially it wasn’t),its relative noncommercial nature and almost all the FREE services make it to this list.It serves in more than 50 countries(550 cities) today.
Started as just a hobby by Craig Newmark,Craigslist today serves over 9 billion pageviews per month and therefore is the 9th most visited website in the U.S.(Alexa).
It receives nearly two million job listings every month and has internships,housing,personals,For sale/barter/wanted,gigs and pets as its listing categories as well.
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Summing it up
“Web has plenty of websites making big bucks but such ‘community devoted’ and ‘value driven’ web services will always remain a memorable landmark in the history of Web“
