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

[William Pietri]

Peter Ansell wrote:
> Daniel Cannon <cannon.danielc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Corporate subservience -- be it to Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other such
>> organization -- calls into question every action of the foundation.
>> Strong criticism, and indeed justified criticism, will be levied against
>> Wikimedia for acting in its advertisers' interests.
> Why is it classed as subservience to allow advertisers to pay for
> something. Non-profit organisations have to make a living somehow, and
> it would be much worse for a corporation to be seen to boss around a
> non-profit organisation than the other way around.
>
>   

Hi, Peter. I confess that "subservience" is a little strong for my 
tastes. But having worked for and with advertising-supported businesses, 
I feel the influence is pervasive. Hopefully it's subtle, but it's 
always there. See [[Chinese Wall#Journalism]] for an example of an 
attempted defense against it, one that has mixed success.

Modern ad networks like Google are a little different in that you don't 
have a direct tie to any particular advertiser. But still, 
advertising-supported businesses aren't really in the business of 
delivering content. They are in the business of selling your attention 
to people with money. It's sort of the same way that cattle ranchers 
aren't really in the business of feeding cows, however much the cows 
might think so. Since currently we only focus on serving users, becoming 
ad-supported at least gives us a strong incentive for divided loyalties.

Even if you can resist that influence, getting a lot of your money from 
one source inevitably forces people to at least think a little harder 
about any action that might disrupt the flow. Accepting Jason's 
$100m/year number for the sake of argument, that means a rogue or clumsy 
admin who breaks the ads would cost us $11k per hour. If we end up 
violating Google's Terms of Service somehow, they could suspend us, 
costing us $273,927 per day. And deciding to shut off ads permanently 
would presumably mean firing a lot of people.

But suppose we could keep that from becoming a sort of subservience. 
Suppose we believe in our hearts that we'll quit the money (and fire the 
people) at the first hint of us compromising an article. Those kinds of 
numbers still create a pretty big conflict of interest. And a conflict 
of interest isn't a problem just because of what you do, but because 
people now have to be more suspicious of you.

William


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri