Peter Ansell wrote:
Daniel Cannon cannon.danielc@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