On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:17:30 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Just a couple of important notes...
phil hunt wrote:
Has anyone contacted Google to see what they
think of opt-in
adverts?
I would like to discourage people from contacting Google directly on
our behalf.
Sure -- I wasn't implying random people should. If anyone sohuld
approach Google it'd have to be someone "official", such as you.
I have an existing and substantial (to me!) business
relationship with Google and good contacts within their ad syndication
group. It will baffle them if random people call them up asking
questions about us.
I expect so.
However,
Wikipedia is quite a high-traffic website, which would
probably give it a reasonable level of clout in any negotiations
with Google.
Sure. Even with Bomis, we don't just sign up for their general public
program, we have a (long and detailed) contract. There's no reason to
assume that their general AdSense terms of service would have much to
do with us.
At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that "opt-in"
is likely to be frowned upon for exactly the reason that you mentioned
-- the audience of people opting in would be too likely to click just
to generate revenue, as opposed to clicking out of genuine interest.
That's useless for the advertisers.
Indeed so. However, I could imagine some adverts being useful and
relevant to me. After all, I'm likely to be visiting Wikipedia pages
I'm interested in, and Google adverts are likely to be well-targeted
(the ones on my personal website seem to be), so it's very likely I
would see some adverts that were of interest to me.
I also am not really comfortable with opt-in. Compared
to opt-out, I
think it would generate very close to zero revenue. Probably less
than 5% of the revenue potential of opt-out. The reason is that the
vast majority of our pageviews are from people who just happen in.
These people are not opposed to advertising, but at the same time,
they will not care enough to bother to read a link about how to enable
ads.
So with opt-in, we get almost all of the "negative press" issues as we
get with opt-out, but we also don't get the kind of money that would
enable us to do really astounding things consistent with our
charitable mission.
If there is opt-out, then people who don't like to see adverts
can't really complain about them. Especially if opting out is easy:
if it was cookie based rather than forcing people to log in to stop
seeing adverts, then people would be able to set preferences for the
site once, and never see another ad. (On a tangent, it'd be nice if
style sheets were cookie-based, since I prefer the traditional style
of WP to the more modern one.)
Let me state again that I am currently opposed to any
advertising on
Wikipedia. I have only been talking about this because I think it is
important for us to continue to make the "no advertising" decision
while being fully cognizant of what it is that we are turning down.
What about the argument the other way round, where people think
Wikipedia is a worthwhile project, and they would donate money to
it, but they see WP turning down substancial amonuts of revenue from
advertising, and they ask themselves "if WP won't help themselves,
why should I help them?"
I've no idea if this represents a significant number of people, but
it might do.
It's much easier for us to say no when we imagine
that the revenue
would be $1,000 a month. It would obviously be much easier for the
community to say no, if the revenue was to go to a for-profit company.
(Hooray! The make-Jimbo-rich fund! Not.)
I think most people here trust your honest intentions.
But I think that the issue really only gets interesting
when we start
talking about really vast sums of money that would be spent with
extreme efficiency to further our charitable aims.
Yes, it does.
--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)