[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia struggles, Mozilla set for life?

[Nick]

We need an open and sensible discussion about adverts, but I suspect this
won't be happening. It's not upto the users now, it's solely upto the board
and if they want to try and run Wikipedia on donations, it's their
prerogative.

How long people will continue to donate to Wikipedia, I don't know, people
are seeing free search, free e-mail and now free office applications from
people like Google, I think it's only a matter of time before people start
thinking why should I donate to keep Wikipedia going, I don't need to donate
to Google to get free services.

I think, however, that if it was clear content advertisers can't actually
influence the content in anyway, there would be generally little resistance
amongst the community to the idea of adverts.

On 23/10/2007, Jason Calacanis <jason at calacanis.com> wrote:
>
> With the risk of sounding like a broken record... :-) Mozilla announced
> (confirmed) they are making over $50M a year from their search box while
> Wikipedia struggles over fund raising on a regular basis.
>
> Some thoughts:
>
> 1. Wikipedia would make $100M+ if they put on Google Adsense on every
> page--easily.
> 2. Wikipedia could let users choose to turn ads on or off.
> 3. Wikipedia would make at least 20M if Wikipedia used Google Adsense for
> just search (which, ironically is what many wikipedia folks do anyway...
> search google for site:wikipedia.com).
> 4. If Wikipedia folks were concerned about being beholden to just Google
> we
> could setup a system to rotate ads from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. randomly
> (text ads of course).
> 5. If folks are concerned about the content of ads it is easy enough to
> block certain advertisers.
>
> More here:
>
> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2007/10/beyond_sustainability.html
>
> Anyway, if folks from the foundation ever want help on these things I'm
> available to consult for free and have setup deals like these (i.e.
> between
> Netscape/AOL/Weblogs, Inc. and Google)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best j
> ---------------------
> Jason McCabe Calacanis
> CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
> Mobile: 310-456-4900
> My blog: http://www.calacanis.com
> AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis
> My admin: admin at calacanis.com
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-- 
Nick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nick