On 10/24/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Mmm. Which side do we sell advertising to on
[[Abortion]]? If you
don't blacklist you'll get screams; if you do you'll get screams,
whoever you pick on.
Actually, you can easily turn off ads on a per page basis. At Mahalo
we turn off ads on controversial pages on a regular basis (think:
school shootings). Also, Google turns them off as well as best they
can.
So, really a non issue.
In an attempt to maintain (appearances of) neutrality,
we'd have to
spend quite a lot of effort controlling who gets these advertising
slots on contested topics; that's going to eat into the profits quite
quickly. It's not a simple matter of "and now, open the money pipe"
Actually, it just might be that easy. What if we opened it up in
stages and get feedback along the way:
Step one: 100% optin advertising where the user has to turn it on.
Step two: put ads on search results, or give folks the option to "Use
Google to search wikipedia" with the ads going to Wikipedia--so again,
opt in.
Step three: if steps one and two do well, PERHAPS put ads on pages by
default. In fact, Wikipedia could run ads up until the point it raised
$50M and then turn them off and live off the 3-5M that would turn over
in interest!
Step one is a total no brainer... i can't think of one reason to be
against OPTin advertising.... can anyone?
best j
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Jason McCabe Calacanis
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