On 1/2/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Anthere" wrote
Might another solution in the future be to really have two websites. One "stable", for readers only (a mirror we would run ourselves) with light advertisement. And the editable one with no ads (and much less traffic) ?
Questions:
(i) If the market is really saying that there is a huge revenue available since people 'in general' don't mind ads (the good French verb is 'mithridatiser', I recall), why is no corporation not sincerely chasing this money with a high-quality WP clone?
Quality is in the eye of the beholder, but Answers Corporation (http://www.answers.com/) is an $80 million public company. Of course if Wikipedia ran its own mirror it would likely be much more popular than answers.com, because people would know that all the net profits go back to the WMF (also because of the synergies such as being able to hook up an ethernet cable directly between the two sites for a live feed). The costs would probably be lower, too, because at least some Wikipedians would likely be willing to work on the mirror site (even though it has advertisements) and there would be no need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the top executive salaries.
Anthony