The site made a name for itself by running leaked and hacked documents, from Sarah Palin’s hacked Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) account, to documents related to toxic oil dumping in Africa. Like another wiki-site, Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, which is loosely based in Iceland, doesn’t run ads, but instead relies on donations to keep operating. It claims not to keep any stats on its traffic: “We do not keep any data on users or visitors so we just can’t tell who uses us,” said editor Daniel Schmitt, who operates from Germany.

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What it does know about its traffic is that there has been more of it than it had ever anticipated, and that has translated into higher costs for Sunshine Press, the group that publishes the site. But very little of that traffic was willing to donate. “When we were up and running people did not perceive that there are operating costs involved,” said Schmitt.

The site is trying to launch a comeback: a viral campaign spurred by a series of stories on the web has helped get the site “more than halfway” to its goal of raising $200,000, according to Schmitt. That still wouldn’t be enough to get the site back up and running: The annual budget for running the site and paying its employees would be $600,000.

Are there other business models to try out in the future? Schmitt says that last year WikiLeaks had tried out an auction process for its documents, offering them to the highest-bidding media outlet, which would get to run them first as an exclusive, before making the documents more widely available on its site. But so far that hasn’t generated enough interest, said Schmitt.

Wikipedia’s entry for WikiLeaks says that it is hosted by PRQ in Sweden, the same company that hosts The Pirate Bay, and has in the past proven successful in protecting the identity of its clients. Schmitt confirms that the Swedish host is a gateway site but that its content is distributed across servers world-wide, “To make use of all the good press laws that are still left around the world.”