LittleDan wrote:
Why does everyone oppose advertizing? I it's descrete enough, it's not intrusive and doesn't lower our credibility.
I'll give you 10 reasons.
1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link between advertising and influence/control over content establishing itself.
2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads consume.
3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash
4: Because users have to pay per MB bandwidth charges to look at ads they don't want to see.
5: Because many of our best contributors will walk out in disgust
6: Because a lot of contrbutors are doing a lot of hard work to create a non-commercial resource of real value. If someone comes along and says, "oh no, all those countless hours you donated to a free comunity project, well, one day I'm going to turn around and use your sweat to make a dollar" then my contribution stops right here and right now. Ditto for a lot of other people. And if Jimbo pulls the pin one day and we need money to keep going, then I'll put my hand in my pocket and help out. Better yet, I'll just provide the hardware, and let some other people pitch in to provide the bandwidth. (I own a computer shop: I have any amount of hardware.)
7: Because a site that carries advertising, even if i is still run on a non-profit basis, would find it much more difficult to persuade people to release material to it, in particular images.
8: Because the relentless urge some people have to commercialise every last damn thing on the planet is personally offensive: to me, and to a great many other people - especially the sort of people who love Wikipedia
9: Because this is an encyclopedia, not a second-rate imitation of Encarta
10: Just because
Tannin