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Should Wikipedia Sell Advertising?
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The LA Times has an interesting story on the state of Wikipedia's finances and how with 300 million page views a day, the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. Without advertising the foundation has a tough time raising its annual budget of $4.6 million. The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed. As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. 'Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years,' said Nathan Awrich, a Wikipedia editor who supports advertising."
Since, according TFA, they just moved offices from FL to San Francisco, and are renting 3000 square feet there. That cannot be cheap. If you're a strapped non-profit, why on earth would you go to one of the most expensive places in the country to run your internet-based business?
I'll just say this, I'd rather have an ad-supported wikipedia than no wikipedia at all.
If the video feature costs more than donations can support, I'm ok with no videos on wikpedia. Perhaps another seperate wikisite can have video with advertisements, while wikipedia itself could maintain its adfree status.
OK, a broken business model that based on begging for money every 6 months or so.
... Gazillions good ideas come to mind. Buy out books to the public domain.
Go for advertising. Buy out books to the public domain, give back some money to wikepedia authors (e.g. give money to proven authors for writing additional articles),
But no money means no money for good ideas. And Wikipedia will stay vulnerable to attacks from someone with money (think Google Knol).
Yes yes, money changes people. Articles may get flawed to get more money. If you think, Wikipedia must stay independent, make it independent. Create a Wikipedia-Ad-foundation, that tries to get as much money as possible, but give them absolutly no control over Wikipedia-The-Content-Organisation. Both orgs should be absolutly independent.
And so you'd have a lot of money *and* complete seperation of concerns.
And there are *so* many unbelievably good ways to spend money.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Bullshit.
They can adopt distributed updates and such and ask universities to help with the bandwidth costs. Instead I guess they want to keep all the chips in hand so that they could one day turn into a billion dollar company.
Wikipedia is run by submitters and editors. If people feel that updating and maintaining wikipedia gives their habits away to advertisers, then it will also kill wikipedia. There will be startups that will focus on just music or movies or just on mathematics and provide a better experience per the negatives of advertising. Most people end up in Wikipedia through google searches and it won't take long for the wikipedia articles to go stale while the contributors move somewhere else.
Plus, those bandwidth heavy images, videos and sounds isn't updated frequently and can be asked to be cached in distributed storage across the internet in universities. Since article updates propagation might be hard in distributed file systems, at least the media should be straightforward.
There is a lot of stuff that can be done.
Not banners.
Something that adds to the value of the site would be good - paid-for "related" links to commercial sites.
Data recovery - link to services. Bridge construction - links to firms building these. Encryption - encryption software. Every single pharmaceutical - online pharmacy. Every single book or movie - amazon.com or other such. So if you're willing to pay for what you've just learned about, you know where to go to buy it or have it done, or learn more about it.
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Or do the gods behind /. use a different browser to me.
/. are the banner ones, and they're fine, but sometimes they are those nasty square ones that block off half the story summary and require multiple reloads to get rid of.
I'm not really going off-topic: my point is that ads really aren't a problem in these high-bandwidth times - at least they're somewhat targeted and they don't intrude.
The problem is, though, that they do. Sometimes the ads on
I have no problem with ads - but they should be tested to see if they work on the 'most-popular' (depending on point of view) browser. Otherwise, don't be bitchin' at me cos I flashblock your ass.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
What wikipedia should do is try to hit up the private sector for some rich sponsors looking to make donations to a tax-free charity.
Maybe a single link on the front page to link to the top 1000 donations of all time and top 1000 donations in the last 12 months will be a nice compromise.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I think Google has shown that it is possible to maintain trust while selling advertising, although I think the Sponsored Link results at the top are skating close to the edge. In fact, Google use is so ubiquitous most people are trained now to mentally segregate content from advertising, providing that the design is clean and consistent about the segregation.
The key is to do a good job on integrating the ads into the site design, so they don't feel intrusive nor are they confused with content.
If you provide the best possible service, people will use it. If you are clear about what is advertising and what is content, people won't distrust you. If you aren't so greedy about selling eyeballs that you abuse the user's time by making him cut through a thicket of advertisements to get to his stuff (like Yahoo), you end up selling a smaller amount of prime real estate than a acres and acres of dump.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Scenario: "I'm young, I'm idealistic. I haven't got a credit card, I haven't got paypal, but I do have a website with at least some few visitors. And I really like Wikipedia."
Think this is uncommon? I certainly don't.
So. How do we "monetize" this resource? Let them run ads generating income for Wikipedia.
Someone(tm) in Wikipedia, or some trustworthy foundation, should set up an account somewhere, and then volunteers will make a few widgets to easily add ads to your site, a Wordpress plugin, banner rotation so you can donate a certain percentage of page impressions... I'm sure more things will come up.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I wouldn't trust Jimmy Wales with my credit card. This just in from http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/more-woes-for-jimmy-wales/2008/03/11/1205125874243.html "The toughest two weeks of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales's career just became a whole lot worse, with a former chief scientist at one of the world's biggest technology companies claiming Wales traded Wiki edits for donations. Jeff Merkey, a former computer scientist at Novell, claims Wales told him in 2006 that in exchange for a substantial donation from Merkey, he would edit his uncomplimentary Wikipedia entry to make it more favourable. Merkey made a $US5000 ($5455) donation in 2006 and the edit history for his Wikipedia entry showed that, around the same time, Wales personally made changes to the entry after wiping it out completely and ordering editors to start over."
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Maybe your problem is your profs then. The vast majority of mine hold wikipedia in quite high regards. Obviously they won't accept it as an academic source, but they usually say it's usually a damn good source of well-structured information for the user that knows how to use it.
With moderation. That way a company can proclaim its product, past consumers can point out its flaws, and administrators can arbitrate disputes of false advertising and libel.
While I had the same joke come to mind, I think the idea has serious merit.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
There's a larger problem with advertising than "people don't like it." I am closely related to a nonprofit organization, one that could also make a butt-load of cash if we were to strategically place advertisments on our web site.
There's a reason we don't and it's not that our visitors would object. IANAA and IANATL, but I do speak to them on occasion. Advertising revenues are what is known as "unrelated business taxable income". Notice the word taxable. It complicates life for a non-profit. Taxable income over a small threshold means that the organizations tax returns must be made public. If contributions and government support fall below 33% of total income, the organization no longer qualifies as "publicly supported." In essence, too much advertising income can jeopardize your status as a non-profit.
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