Every two to three years Jimbo flips his opinion on the advertising issue, which I suppose is good, as long as we never have ads.*
I think there are better revenue streams for the Wikimedia Foundation to be pursuing, in particular CD/DVD dead-tree versions of Wikipedia/Wikibooks, although those will corrupt the nature of the project too, perhaps in worse ways, so who really knows.
But then I like the idea of free public libraries, which makes me something of a Communist in the eyes of free-market techno-capitalist libertarians these days.
Note:
In 2001 Jimbo wrote this: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_on_Wikipedia
Someday, there will be advertising on Wikipedia. Either that, or we will have to find some other way to raise money, but I can't think of any.
In 2003 Jimbo wrote in this thread: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-June/thread.html#3975
Toby Bartels wrote:
I interpreted that page as very old, only historical.
*Very* historical. I'm now of the opinion that advertising is not likely to ever be a viable or sensible revenue source for wikipedia.
One frame of reference -- at the time that was written, I was paying $100k a year for ongoing expenses (programming, editor-in-chiefing, etc.) for Nupedia. Wikipedia has no similar expenses.
Bandwidth and hardware are cheap, and so we have no particular need of money for what we're doing right now.
--Jimbo
* But then, I guess we probably will in a few years, which is when the Inevitable Fork will happen.