Thomas Dalton wrote:
You haven't actually addressed the issue to email you replied to was talking about. We're not saying users won't like ads (although that's probably true as well), we're saying that inappropriate ads could cause serious problems, so we would have to control what ads we show, which causes even more problems.
You know what else gets me? We have an entire WikiProject worth of people who spend lots of time just patrolling articles for inappropriate, unencyclopedic spam links and removing them. If we were really desperate for the money, why wouldn't we just say "Hey spammer, pay us $X and we'll let your link stay there." Because it ruins NPOV and creates COI.
Why do people think revenue-generating ads served by a vendor are any different?
--Darkwind