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."

Comments

My sympathy is limited

[jrjarrett]

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?

They should, begging for money is no business mode

[egghat]

OK, a broken business model that based on begging for money every 6 months or so.

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), ... Gazillions good ideas come to mind. Buy out books to the public domain.

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.

Re:obviously they should sell advertising

[mochan_s]

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.

Links to commercial content.

[SharpFang]

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.

What about sponsers?

[MMC Monster]

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.

Why don't we do their advertising?

[Esteanil]

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.

Re:Oooh.

[ajs]

All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly. It's beyond silly. IMHO, Jimbo should be one of the three men in the world, at this point. If wealth is our measure of reward for your value to the community, then surely the man who made it possible to preserve our shared knowledge should be rewarded duly. I feel the same way about anyone who improved the state of our world. If his worst crime is to try (not succeed, mind you, but try) to get reimbursed for an obscenely expensive meal, then he's doing better than most politicians who have done far, far, FAR less for improving our lot.

Re:I've got a better idea

[Flwyd]

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.