Wikipedia Meets $16M Budget Goal

netbuzz writes "Thanks to some 630,000 individual contributions that averaged $22 apiece, Wikipedia has reached its fundraising goal of $16 million, founder Jimmy Wales announced over the weekend. Writes Wales, '... this year is a little more incredible than most because this year we celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. It's so important that we kick the year off just like this: by fully funding the Wikimedia Foundation's budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects as we head into the next decade of our work together.' The online encyclopedia now boasts of being the Internet's fifth largest site, which renews questioning by some as to whether it can afford over the long haul to stand by its policy of refusing advertising."

Comments

Pay to skip the ads

[oldspewey]

I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).

Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.

Re:Pay to skip the ads

[Anthony Mouse]

I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).

Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.

Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level. Now consider this:
1) The cost of bandwidth and servers, which has got to be some large fraction of their expenses, go down over time.
2) They made their financing goal for this year, a year in which by (1) their costs are likely to be higher than in future years.

Also, $16M in the scheme of things is not a lot of money. If that's their yearly budget then all it would take is one billionaire to provide them a $350M or so endowment in a will or something and they would be set forever just on the interest. (That is, once interest rates get back above 0% again.)

Realistically, the biggest threat to Wikipedia is ISPs violating network neutrality. If Wikipedia had to pay whatever tithe each ISP decided they were entitled to in order to reach their subjects, that could explode their costs pretty quickly and require them to seek other sources of funding.

Re:Pay to skip the ads

[oldspewey]

... or Wikipedia could just refuse to pay a single penny, and go ahead and let that ISP cut them off (or degrade the performance to the point of frustration/unusability). Within 2 days that ISP's support lines would be flooded with angry callers wondering what happened to the source of information they pretty much rely on to run their lives.

Re:Pay to skip the ads

[Seumas]

I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).

Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.

Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level.

Not to mention, "subscribe to remove ads" in absolutely no way addresses the real problem. If you have included, censored, removed, or otherwise modified some piece of content to appease a sponsor (either by sense of obligation or direct demand), then the damage is already done. Whether or not there is also a banner ad from the company along side it -- or it has been removed because I gave you cash -- is irrelevant.

Re:Pay to skip the ads

[tepples]

Within 2 days that ISP's support lines would be flooded with angry callers wondering what happened to the source of information they pretty much rely on to run their lives.

ISP's reply: "Add Wikipedia to your plan for just $2.99 per month for the first 24 months, plus tax and franchise fees."

Hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not supposed to cite Wikipedia!

I don't normally say this, but...

[Pojut]

...I'd be fine with advertising on Wikipedia, so long as it's the silent, non-flyover non-flash on-topic kind. Actually, Google Adwords would go perfectly on there...it would remain unobtrusive, stay topical, and provide some income.

Re:I don't normally say this, but...

[GoCoGi]

Yes, and after Wikipedia has become dependend on the income from Google they can start changing the policy as they wish.

Re:I don't normally say this, but...

[swillden]

Yes, and after Wikipedia has become dependend on the income from Google they can start changing the policy as they wish.

So Wikipedia should ask for the policy to be specified contractually, with a specified re-negotiation interval and a defined re-negotiation process that requires mutual agreement for any changes. The contract should also specify that either party may walk away, but that, say, six months' notice is required. That would give Google an out, but ensure that Wikipedia has time to restructure their fundraising.

Really, all of these sorts of problems can be solved. This is what contract negotiation is for.

Re:I don't normally say this, but...

[tukang]

Maybe a lot of articles will suddenly become related to products. Pass

Re:I don't normally say this, but...

[melikamp]

Google Adwords would go perfectly on there...it would remain unobtrusive, stay topical, and provide some income

Provide some income, yes. The rest is subjective, and for many people false. When I look up encyclopedic or scientific information, any ad on the same page would be obtrusive and not topical: I did not ask for this information, and it has NOTHING to do with my query. When I look up "shoe" in an encyclopedia, I want to see encyclopedic material, not a link to nike.com. This is because Nike provides actual shoes, and not objective factual information about shoes. In fact, Nike is notorious for bullshitting and lying through their teeth in their shoe information releases, a.k.a. "ads".

And when I want to buy something, then may be I'll use Google, TYVM.

Re:I don't normally say this, but...

[mu22le]

You know... someone should take the tame to setup a wikipedia mirroro with addwords, encourage people to use that instead of the original wikipedia and then donate the revenue to the wikimedia foundation. Just to give Jimbo a taste of the idea.

Begging

[Anonymous Coward]

Is begging for donations every year really a viable model for one of the most popular websites in the world?

Re:Begging

[jhoegl]

Ask NPR, it has been their business model for quite some time.

Re:Begging

[at_slashdot]

Sometimes I feel like I prefer the ads than the constantly begging for money...

Re:Begging

[JDRucker]

But NPR doesn't have a creepy stare hovering over you as you watch all of their content.

Re:Begging

[Rude Turnip]

I prefer to put my money where my mouth is and support public radio. After not watching any commercial news for probably the last few years and just relying on NPR and BBC for the most part, I happened to visit a relative when the TV news came on. I am not exaggerating when I say the news show had a jittery cartoon-like appearance in its speech and presentation style. And it was mostly commercials. That is the mindless garbage you get when you let someone else pay for your news.

Re:Begging

[Blue Stone]

>Sometimes I feel like I prefer the ads than the constantly begging for money...

Indeed ... until, I's warrant, you have reason to consider the power and influence the companies that adverise, then exert over the content broadcast.

Corporate censorship is pernicious as government censorship (esp. as we've seen recently where the two walk arm-in-arm).

Re:Begging

[melikamp]

That's great, because Wikimedia is not begging. They would be begging if they gave you nothing in return. As it stands, they encourage you to become a patron. When people slander them by calling them beggars, it only shows how little these people appreciate the Foundation's work.

Re:Begging

[nbauman]

Over the last 50 years, cigarette companies were the biggest advertisers in women's magazines. Half their ad pages might be cigarette ads.

Women's magazines warned about every cancer but one -- lung cancer. For 50 years, health coverage was a major topic for women's magazines, but they pointedly avoided any mention of the health effects of cigarettes. The editors of these magazines admitted it, and it's been proven in published academic studies. Or you can just go to the library and look at them.

Conversely, the few women's magazines and consumer magazines that didn't take cigarette advertising did run articles on smoking and health.

Cigarettes are the most obvious example, but you can find that same bias in the coverage of all the major advertisers in most news media -- alcohol, automobiles.

Public radio is now taking advertising. I've heard a lot of local news stories about their advertisers, particularly in the music and entertainment business.

Wikipedia is already getting all the money it needs. (TFA doesn't explain *why* they need more money -- more server farms?) There's a real risk advertising would compromise their objectivity. It has everywhere else.

Ad campaign = less viewership

[fotbr]

That begging campaign got so annoying that I haven't been to wikipedia in the last two months. I don't think I'll go back either, so consider that my contribution -- an infinitesimal decrease in server load and bandwidth required to keep the site running.

Re:Ad campaign = less viewership

[Riceballsan]

I did just the oposite, I laughed so hard at the advertisement, I used the chrome extension to add it to every page
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/idkjdjficifbfjjkdkiimioljbloddpl

Re:Ad campaign = less viewership

[Iphtashu Fitz]

It was the non-stop display of smug holier-than-thou photos of Jimmy Wales and all his cronies that did it for me.

Re:Ad campaign = less viewership

[drinkypoo]

For me it was the incompetence. After the first ten times I've closed your fucking ad, stop showing it to me. It's obviously a waste of everyone's bandwidth (assuming I visit enough other sites to remove it from my cache...)

First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll See

[eldavojohn]

Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.

This is fine reasoning, even the opinion article linked to advocates this. But there is an important issue that needs to be addressed first and that is how ads are handled for each particular page. Google's highest bidder model is what I am most afraid of. These don't even have to be selling advertisements. For example if I went to the page on Anti-lock Braking Systems I would suspect automakers would pay large amounts of money to be the ad banner for that page with the simple statement of '<highest bidding automaker> provides the #1 ABS with a safety rating surpassing all others.'

And, though insanely lucrative, a part of me fears that this would really disrupt or even destroy the concept of a peer reviewed encyclopedia. When I edit a page and look at it, I don't want to see some banner ad with lies or half-truths at the top of it and you know as well as I that that is exactly what advertising degrades to. The problem is that online advertising has become so savvy that these pages would specifically be targeted en mass by manufacturers and bid on through whoever provides the advertising for Wikipedia. And I will make the statement that giving them the ability to put advertising would be severely detrimental to the integrity for Wikipedia ... if not for no one else than at least to a high degree for me.

I hope...

[ido50]

I hope that means I won't have to see Jimbo's creepy face any more.

Re:Bad Maths [citation needed]

[Aldanga]

TFA says:

More than 500,000 donations averaging $22 apiece were made to the Wikimedia Foundation, while local Wikipedia chapters generated another 130,000 gifts worldwide.

The summary is incorrect.

oh gee. alright.

[unity100]

so, because they begged, you are not going to wikipedia. before, you had no issues using the communal resource everyone came together and created, for FREE. however, when they asked you to give a hand for the costs, you have suddenly got irritated.

maybe its good that you are contributing to the effort, by not going.

Re:oh gee. alright.

[fotbr]

I quit contributing when the "editors" started going completely bonkers a couple years back. Prior to that, I contributed to articles fairly frequently, and money on occasion.

But enjoy your high horse.

speak for yourself

[unity100]

i have used wikipedia to great extent. only witless morons who are not able to notice citation and references the articles are constructed from, talk blabberscrap about wikipedia.

Re:First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll

[Rude Turnip]

I always thought this was self-destructive behavior on Slashdot's part.

Re:Ads?

[The End Of Days]

You brave anonymous coward.

Jimmy Wales Not "The Founder"

[BeanThere]

Obligatory just-to-try-set-the-record-straight (as the summary perpetuates the common myth) Jimmy Wales isn't "the" founder of Wikipedia, he didn't come up with the idea for Wikipedia, didn't agree with the idea initially and had to be convinced, didn't come up with the name, didn't build the initial software, and didn't create the first Wikipedia community. Most of the credit for all of the above goes to co-founder Larry Sanger; in the beginning Wales acknowledged this but he has since been attempting to rewrite history by going around marketing himself as "the founder" of Wikipedia. He is at very best "co-founder".

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001424.html

I just believe strongly in credit where credit is due, and in not taking credit for other people's work.

Re:Advertising is evil

[natehoy]

I'm going to assume your "biG" is a Google reference.

So you're saying that Google, a company that makes almost every penny of its income in the form of advertising revenue, should buy Wikipedia and offer it as a free service to everyone, denying themselves the only possible reason they'd ever want to buy it?

Don't get me wrong, having Google support Wikipedia is a great idea given their drive and desire to make information available to all (Google Maps/Earth, Google Books, etc), but there would have to be ads.

If Google did it, it would probably be AdWords, so it wouldn't be terribly intrusive and the ads would be useful, but there would be ads. And google-analytics, which wouldn't be even less desirable.

Re:Bad Maths [citation needed]

[ToreTS]

Correct understanding of averages, actually.

Was the ad cost-effective?

[gman003]

That banner ad wasn't just annoying - it was a rather large image, and it changed often enough that it wasn't always in cache. Given that, I suspect the ad itself was responsible for quite a bit of server load - possibly more than it brought in. I also doubt the ad was that effective. It could even have been counter-productive - "Jimmy is watching you" photoshops are now a minor meme, and not the kind an advertising agency wants to create.

So, we have an ad that was (for a non-profit) somewhat expensive, and was not (in my estimation) particularly effective. I would like to see some more in-depth analysis of that ad's cost-effectiveness, or lack thereof.

I would have donated...

[_xeno_]

I would have donated, but apparently I'm not notable enough, and so my donation was speedily deleted.

Re:First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll

[Abstrackt]

I always thought this was self-destructive behavior on Slashdot's part.

I can't speak for others but just the fact that I was given the option to block ads at the site level is enough for me to allow them. I feel that little checkbox is a sign of respect from this site and since I'm too cheap to pay to be a subscriber, I show my respect by leaving the ads in place.

Ignore and everything will be ok!

[santiam]

Who knew that I could just ignore all the pleas and everything would turn out ok.

Now that I know that it works, I will apply it to all my problems throughout my life!

Ads?? But the annual fund raiser was a success!

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I can't understand the mentality of the story summary.

The news is: the annual fund raiser was a success. It raised more money than ever before, in a shorter time than the previous fund raisers.

How does raising oodles of money without ads make someone wonder if ads will soon be required?

The news story answers this question: No, there is clearly no need for ads.

Ads could even ruin Wikipedia's funding model. Would so many people donate if there were ads and if Wikipedia had a conflict of interest (don't offend the advertisers)?

TFA misses the point

[nbauman]

TFA misses the point.

He's used to dealing with companies whose goal is to make money.

The goal of Wikipedia is not to make money.

The goal is to have reliable, objective information, and it's an ongoing effort to do that already.

Advertising will make it worse. If Pepsi-Cola is a major advertiser, will that affect the presence of unflattering material on Pepsi-Cola's page? The experience of advertiser influence on print and broadcasting media is that it will.

Financial analysts made similar recommendations for Craigslist. Craigslist could make more money if they took advertising. But the purpose of Craigslist wasn't to make money. Craig already had money. He wanted to do something cool.

It's like saying, "Your household is operating according to the wrong model. If your wife were to work as an escort, and if you were to sell your children for body parts, you could make a lot more money." But the purpose of your household isn't to maximize your income.

It is called pushing your point!

[SmallFurryCreature]

The point is that some people just can't accept that a successfull site can be run without ads. So they use every single event to push their idea EVEN if the event disproves it. See climate change denialist. Hottest year, coldest winter but everything is just fine...

Re:First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Wikipedia can make the ad section blatantly obvious, so to distinguish between ads and content.

I think you missed eldavojohn's point. The fear is that the ads will inevitably leak into the content -- that is, not only will you have the "blatantly obvious" ads on some separate section of the page, you'll also have content rewritten to push products. And this fear is quite justified. Any time you take money from someone, you have aligned your interests with theirs. We /.ers love to complain, with good reason, about the "Senator from Disney" and the blatant corporate spin in the mass media, and it's easy enough to see why this happens: campaign contributions and advertising money set the agenda. There's no particular reason to assume Wikipedia would be immune to this sort of corruption.

Why not have a free opt-out?

[raving griff]

I remember reading a Slashdot comment last year suggesting that even placing something as small as a Google Ad on the frontpage would be enough to generate the year's worth of revenue. Because Wikipedia is so popular, might it not be sustainable to introduce ads with a free opt-out? Nobody who doesn't want to see ads is exposed to them, and those that don't opt out, whatever minority they are, could sustain the site.

Re:Why not have a free opt-out?

[pz]

I remember reading a Slashdot comment last year suggesting that even placing something as small as a Google Ad on the frontpage would be enough to generate the year's worth of revenue. Because Wikipedia is so popular, might it not be sustainable to introduce ads with a free opt-out? Nobody who doesn't want to see ads is exposed to them, and those that don't opt out, whatever minority they are, could sustain the site.

Slippery slope argument. In other words, this small amount of advertising that you can readily turn off is OK. Next year, it's a little more intrusive, and then more, and more. Finally the central repository of knowledge is not Wikipedia, but WikiCocaCola.

Try not getting your news from corporate/network sponsored television for a month, and listen to NPR and the BBC (and read them online, if you wish) instead. Then view one of the standard network news broadcasts. You will, I suspect, react like many thinking people and shudder at what corporate sponsorship does. Keep knowledge libre and fund it directly without the middle man of corporate sponsorship.

If you (speaking to the larger audience, rather than the parent poster) can't bring yourself to pay for a service that you use on a regular basis and have direct benefit from, then I have only two words: grow up .

Re:Camouflaged Close

[TaoPhoenix]

Hulu now has game-show ads that take 3 and 8 clicks to get rid of even by the shortcut. Hey, why not just write a college term paper to "deserve" to bypass that single ad impression?

"Write a 15 page essay describing why you either agree or disagree with the ad's presented viewpoint. Show your work and citations."

Re:First Address Targeted Advertising, Then We'll

[Thing 1]

Editable ads!