On 10/24/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@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 --------------------- Jason McCabe Calacanis CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com Mobile: 310-456-4900 My blog: http://www.calacanis.com