Fastfission wrote:
Just a few thoughts on advertising:
- It wouldn't have to be banner ads in the obnoxious sense. Surely
there could be some sort of quality control and discreteness about it. I'm sure we could find someone willing to shell out a lot of funding for a small ad on the lower left hand corner of each page. If every set of advertisements had to be approved by some small board of thoughtful people, it would probably keep out the "You may be a winner!" and "Mortgage your house online!" ads.
Will NPOV apply to ads? :)
- What if ad content could be controlled through user CSS pages? Those
who are 'in the know' could outright disable them without difficulty. People without accounts could never disable them. What's the ratio of logged-in to non-logged in page hits?
Already doable on Wikicities etc. Someone complained to Angela that I was doing this, and was told that it was OK so long as I didn't do it to an entire Wikicity or anything :)
- I think that "targetted" schemes along the lines of Google Adsense
are a bad idea. If we have ads, they should be as little connected to the content being viewed as possible, as a matter of integrity. Article content and article titles should have NO relation to advertising content. If it does, we are not only inviting some raised eyebrows about content validity, but we're inviting people to try and game the system by modifying articles in oh-so-clever and minor ways to get their specific advertisements listed first.
I wonder, is there anything that community consensus (shudder) would determine would be a "good cause" to run ads for?
- Perhaps there are other revenue models we should consider first
before advertising. At the moment the only ones on the table seem to be 1. selling hard-copies, 2. begging, and 3. advertising. I have the business acumen of a pigeon but surely there must be alternatives to these three.
Given that Jimbo et. al. chose the GFDL to put everything under Way Back When, hard copies seems like the perfect choice - it even tells you how to do it! :)
PS. Is WikiProject No Ads still running? Or have things changed a whole heap since the Answers.com proposal?