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

Let's do something special again...

[MrMage]

WikipediAds, the advertisements anyone can edit! Who better to make the ads than the customers?

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?

Re:My sympathy is limited

[downix]

Actually, as I currently live in FL and am looking to the west coast for relocating, guess what, it actually *is* cheaper to live in the San Francisco area than in Florida. While the initial rent is a bit higher (about 3-5%) the taxes to operate are far lower, and the infastructure cost to the individual business is dramatically less.

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.

Re:obviously they should sell advertising

[Himring]

you have to pay the bills. idealism doesn't pay the bills.

Look. Our little liberal is growing up and becoming a conservative....

Re:Well .....

[Threni]

> I even plan to start reselling ADSL with a transparent proxy configured my own special way, so other people can also enjoy the same
> advertisement-free Internet experience (and I can make a few quid as a secondary consideration).

I take it you won't be advertising your service?

It's the opposite

[NewAndFresh]

a "compromised" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia

One of the important things that make wikpedia is that there is no advertising.
Like many people have already pointed out, there are many other options.
You add advertising and it's no longer wikipedia.
So I'll fix that for you:
a "slower" wikipedia is better than no wikipedia.

Re:It's the opposite

[h4rm0ny]

Now that deserves an Insightful mod. I dislike that questions such as this are just accepted without reservation: That you get to choose between Wikipedia and Compromised Wikipedia. Who framed those options and what did they do to reach the conclusion that this choice is inevitable.

-A Proud Wikipedia Donator

-H.

I've got a better idea

[davidwr]

Allow advertising that anyone can edit.

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.