I can see us raising a few hundred thousand dollars by contributions. I can't see a few million. I can see contributions supporting 100 servers. I can't see them supporting 2,000. I can see a top 20 website supported by contributions. I can't see one of the top 5. Fred On Dec 30, 2005, at 3:02 PM, Ben Emmel wrote:

On 12/30/05, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin(a)gmail.com> wrote: As Wikipedia gets larger we get more users. The more users, the more donations, so individual donations are more scalable than you think. Mgm

Kirill Lokshin wrote: "Wikipedia (sponsored by UNESCO)" would be a much better alternative... -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Perhaps the best solution would be like the one Salon, Weather Underground, and many other sites use: pay a subscription fee (say, $29.95 a year) or see (and probably ignore) the ads. That way we'd have our choice of how to personally support Wikipedia. jpgordon

I recall having made this comment on a talk page somewhere but anyway :) Personally I find wikipedia 'strange' in not having ads. I'm not sure I can think of any other site on the web with a similar popularity without ads. Even microsoft.com has ads for Microsoft products. All newspaper sites do, slashdot does etc etc. So the precedent is certainly there. I agree with the idea of the subscription fee if you can't stand even discreet Google Adsense type ads. But instead of $30 a year, why not $5? At the moment we charge nothing, so isn't charging *anything* better? And any relatively active user is probably going to generate $5 worth of Adsense ads anyway, isn't he? I don't know what percentage of users donate currently, but it's probably very low. Even assuming that all these people drastically reduce their contributions in reaction to the introduction of ads, you'd probably be a long way ahead. I know that there are many ideologies at play in the Wikipedia world, like "free" information, unrestrained contribution (even by anonymous users), GFDL licensing etc - but I don't see a logical connection from there to the provision of an ad-free service. In any case, I as a user would be more than happy to put up with a few ads (or a low yearly fee) to be rid of server strain, and the feeling of using a service running on a shoestring. Steve

Steve Bennett wrote: Wikipedia is *supposed* to be strange compared to the rest, though. In addition to being strange in having no ads, we're also strange in licensing our content under the GFDL, rather than the more standard "All Rights Reserved" that Microsoft, Slashdot, CNN, et al use. In any case, Jimbo already explicitly promised that there will never be ads on Wikipedia as long as he has a say in it, so I don't see why this is an issue. -Mark

Hi, It's nice to hear the other side of the ad argument. If anyone has some "further reading", I'd be grateful. For the purpose of making WP better of course :) Good point. Do you think they would do that rather than, say, pay $5 not to see them? What if WP had a rule that said anyone with 1500 edits was exempt from ads? IMHO it's a shoestring whenever income ~= expenses. If the income for a year only *just* covers server expenditure with no room for backups, future proofing, redundancy, taking risks etc, then it's a shoestring - the magnitude is irrelevant. I wasn't suggesting denying access to anyone. Presumably a poor African would not object to seeing ads if they get a free encyclopaedia out of the deal. "Presumably". It's the only site I have regularly used in the last couple of years which as a normal part of usage puts up "Server experiencing difficulties, come back lately". I get that message on WP pretty much every day during certain hours. And that's not to mention some of the more esoteric messages like edits being disabled, the DB being out of sync etc. I would *much* rather have ads than put up with server unavailability. (And yes, I'm a newbie, in case anyone was wondering :)) True. Where is WP headed? Steve

On 12/31/05, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I happen to have the 2004 (fiscal year) Form 990-EZ for the Wikimedia Foundation in front of me right now (if you'd like to follow along, I uploaded it to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Wikimedia_990_2004.pdf). Revenue = $71,171. Expenses = $14,504. I'm sure 2005 was basically the same (only with bigger numbers). Cash flow is roughly zero, but this is fairly meaningless. For example, Microsoft had a negative cash flow in 2005, the same year their income - expenses was over $3 billion. Anthony

On 12/31/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: He's claimed that his statement was only that any decision regarding advertising on Wikipedia would come from the community, not from him (and looking at the history of posts this seems to be true). See this post (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-October/004517.html): This is _not_ to say that we will go down any path towards advertising on the site. I have always said, and continue to say, that decision will come from the community, not from me. Just earlier this year he said on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bomis: This is very POV. The Wikipedia community has never "ruled out" advertising, and this article makes it seem like the reason I went the non profit route and no-advertising is in response to resistance from the community. This is not accurate. I have consistently been opposed to advertising on Wikipedia, although in the early days I thought advertising was going to eventually be necessary. Now I think advertising will never be necessary, but I wonder if someday we (the community) might decide that we could do so much good in the world with a small amount of advertising that we might choose to accept it. --Jimbo Wales 19:04, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC) Here's a quote from those "early days" (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Advertising_on_Wikipedia): Note: This is a preliminary essay, intended to give you food for thought. Comments are welcome, but at this time, please make your comments to me privately, or if you must be public about it, do it on the wikipedia-l mailing list. Everything discussed here is so preliminary at this point that public debate isn't really warranted. I seek feedback here primarily to refine my own thinking about the issues raised. 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. This is not coming soon. As of today, November 9, 2001, I would say that this is at least 6 months to (more likely) 1 year away. Why then, and not now? Because despite encouraging growth in traffic, the amount of money that could be made from having sponsorship of Wikipedia is not enough to worry about. I imagine that there will be some resistance to advertising from adamant anti-capitalists, and from those who think that any association with money is necessarily corrupting. I can't really help that, and I can only state for the record that I think such people are seriously mistaken in many aspects of their world view. But there may be other resistance to advertising from people with legitimate concerns! And I hope to address those concerns now, long before this becomes an "instant issue". First, I know from long experience at Bomis (which currently has more than 100 million monthly pageviews throughout our entire network, which makes us a big site, but not exactly Yahoo!), that advertisers don't ever attempt to dictate content. So it strikes me as extremely unlikely that any advertiser will ever care what Wikipedia's content is. Certainly, I have never seen it at Bomis. Second, despite the fact that such a thing would be extremely unlikely, if an advertiser ever did ask for changes to the content to flatter them, I would simply respond: go to hell. The independence of the community is essential to the longterm success of this project. Third, advertising should be done in a tasteful way. To me this means at least these things, and a lot more besides: (a) no popup ads, (b) advertising clearly marked as such, so that visitors do not mistake it for content, (c) keyword-based advertising to whatever extent possible, so that the user is presented with _relevant_ advertising, (d) text-link based advertising preferable to banners or other high-bandwidth advertising, to preserve the beautiful simplicity of our interface. At the top of that page, some time before September 2002, a note was added: There are currently no plans for Advertising on Wikipedia. Instead, I had to let Larry go as an employee. This reduced my costs to maintain wikipedia to a level that I can carry for a long long time to come. To achieve my long term goals for wikipedia (including distribution to everyone on the planet!), funds will likely be required. We'll figure that out in the future, but donations to the nonprofit organization is my preference. Jimbo Wales FWIW, I can't find any evidence that any promise was ever made. Here's a mailing list post from March 2002 (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-March/019238.html): With the resignation of Larry, there is a much less pressing need for funds. Therefore, all plans to put advertising of any kind on the wikipedia is called off for now. In 2004, in a Slashdot interview (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/1351230), Wales said: The question of advertising is discussed sometimes, but not really in the context of "will we need to accept ads to survive". The answer to that is clearly "no". The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website. That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission. But it's more complex than that, even, because in large part, our success so far is due to the purity of what we're doing. We might find that accepting ad money would cut us off from possible grant money. It's a complex question. But it is not a question that has to be answered for our continuing survival. We can keep going as we are now, with your help of course. :-)

As soon as we introduce ads, then policy will be dictated by the companies, not us (we all know how it works) If Wikipedia stops being as it is then I will strongly consider leaving the project On 12/30/05, Ben Emmel <bratsche1(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- ~Ilya N. http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)

--- Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Everyting from "I" on was me talking for myself. That was also written a long time ago (over three years), so I don't recall what exactly I based the paraphrase on either. A historical note: That post was part of my effort to reunify the Enciclopedia Libre and the Spanish Wikipedia. What I was doing was pointing out each of the reasons EL stated prompted them to start a fork and what has been done since the split to correct their grievances. Interesting read for anybody who wasn't around at that time. -- mav __________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com

"Daniel Mayer" wrote. I'm not going to argue on the numbers. The mission is _still_ to write the encyclopedia, rather than look at it from the finance director's point of view. Let's continue to bear that in mind. Charles

On 12/31/05, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: That is a pretty good argument for ads yes. I still don't know myself, I do really like it that wp is ad free. Perhaps we should use Google ads on Wikipedia. Daniel Brandt will have a field day with that one. :) Garion

--- charles matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: And to continue writing that encyclopedia we need to keep our financial house in order. Numbers are farily important in that regard. Let't not forget that. :) -- mav __________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com

On 1/1/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Do we have any idea of the income ads will produce? If so, how accurate is the projections? How about income projections for limited ads (prohibited from article namespace, for example).

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. * 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? * 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. * 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. FF

Josh Gordon wrote: To tell the truth, ads strung along the side of the screen wouldn't stop me from editing, but if the servers get unresponsive, I kill all my WP windows and go do something else. (Of course, that "something else" may be prepping another batch of photos for upload to WP later. :-) ) Stan

-- Steve Bennett &lt;stevage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: argument. Objectively, about Wikipedia as an online community. There are other wikis, there are >other collaborative projects, there are >other online forums etc etc. So all of that different that it makes sense ads". I generally tend to agree with you, but 1) the issue isnt really as fancy as that, and 2) <sarcasm>Wikipedia is not a community/democracy/etc./etc./<sarcasm> Im guessing that growth projections would show that if Wikipedia didnt have any server problems whatsoever, it would now rank about 10 (instead of 30). So once the server situation gets up to its optimal capacity (theres a market cap for everything: maybe at 2x current capacity) there will be other costs. Legal fees, paid server techs, backpay for work (to keep people happy), limousines, etc. With success comes its costs. Does WP's continued success depend more on those princples or on its financial and commercial competitiveness with commercialist or academic/elitist upstarts/restarts. Arent there degrees in-between? WP's huge demand makes it not just needing to keep up, but it puts it in a position to make egalitarian demands and not merely bend to commercialist ones. Open model success might have limits, but a high enough degree of success makes the very notion of ads at least [[edit]]able, and therefore feasibly compatible with the open culture. Fastfission did a good job of breaking down the basic 'compromise' about how ads could work. Stevertigo "You have just won {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} dollars!" __________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com

"Steve Bennett" wrote There is such a thing as a free lunch. If you require a proof, look around. Charles

On 1/1/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: What's the point of an encyclopedia that no one uses? We're not constructing a Platonic ideal of an encyclopedia, we're building something that people use around the world every day. I find that an essential component of what we're doing here and we really should be doing things with that in mind.

On 1/1/06, Geoff Burling &lt;llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com&gt; wrote: This is I think the only serious criticism in your list (the others can be mitigated without too much difficulty, I think, with the exception of the "older Internet" which I'm not sure is intended to be a convincing argument and the "community" one which seems rather dependent on the type of advertising path chosen). It would be of the utmost imperative that any potential advertiser know that their advertisement would be displayed on all pages -- good and bad, long-termed and short-lived, featured articles and vandalisms -- unless there were some way to disable that which I'm not seeing. Of course they would be without liability but nevertheless I think the idea would probably cull out quite a lot of advertisers, given the extremes of content which exist around here. FF

Rob wrote: It's not necessary for people to get it from *us*. Our goal is to write an encyclopedia. Once an encyclopedia starts emerging, the distribution task can be done by anyone, by the nature of open/free content licensing. And it's a valuable enough resource that that is virtually guaranteed to happen---we've already started seeing high-quality 3rd-party redistribution, such as the German paper version. -Mark

"Fastfission" wrote idea would probably cull out quite a lot of advertisers, given the extremes of content which exist around here. I'd like to be a fly on the wall - in a meeting where ad placement on one of the most popular pages on WP-English is discussed, and the executive of the multinational corporation realises half-way through that it's all about some four-letter word. (Not that I call the inclusion of such pages extreme.) Charles

Fastfission wrote: Agreed Good point. However, current advertisement models show that the best revenues are gathered from targetted advertisement. Agreed. Well, current appeal could be called "begging". As Mav explained already, we are far from having enough right now to fulfill our first trimester needs. And we finished the year on our reserves. So, "begging" makes sense. The problems associated with "selling hard copies" are * making a partnership with a firm or organisation to "produce the hard copy" and then to "distribute" the content. Or should we set up another organisation to do that ourselves ? * filtering content to put on the hard copy (removing copyvios... we need many editors to get involved here) * assuming all legal possible consequences (copyvios again), which implies having financial reserves to assume this. Other models may involve * finding more sponsors (but, who will take care of this ?) * writing grants (which is also a job in itself, with few people motivated and experienced to do it) We might have employees to do these two tasks, but again, we need to "invest" to get these guys. Ant

Rob wrote: True, but is the goal for the content only to be used on the internet through our website. Or is that goal for the content to spread, be used, reused, through thousands of supports (cd, dvd, newspaper, other websites, books...) ? ant

"Anthere" wrote Questions: (i) If the market is really saying that there is a huge revenue available since people 'in general' don't mind ads (the good French verb is 'mithridatiser', I recall), why is no corporation not sincerely chasing this money with a high-quality WP clone? (ii) If WP added advertisements, what would its attitude be to GFDL licencees of WP material who would be 'diverting' income? Would it be _absolutely unchanged_, i.e. 'go ahead, we give this stuff away'? Charles

On 1/2/06, charles matthews &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: Quality is in the eye of the beholder, but Answers Corporation (http://www.answers.com/) is an $80 million public company. Of course if Wikipedia ran its own mirror it would likely be much more popular than answers.com, because people would know that all the net profits go back to the WMF (also because of the synergies such as being able to hook up an ethernet cable directly between the two sites for a live feed). The costs would probably be lower, too, because at least some Wikipedians would likely be willing to work on the mirror site (even though it has advertisements) and there would be no need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the top executive salaries. Anthony

charles matthews wrote: Since there are already mirrors with ads, yes, there are people chasing that money now. A high-quality clone that could compete with WP's name recognition would require significant investment up front, and take several years to establish itself in the public's mind; there are a hundred easier ways for entrepreneurs to make money with the net. Even so, venture capitalists are probably getting WP-related proposals every week. It would have to be. WP's copyright is jointly held by thousands of individuals, all of whom would have standing to take the Foundation to court. Need more plaintiffs? Just have them edit for a day... :-) Stan

Nick Boalch wrote: I agree. This is the most worrying situation. Putting on the ads ONLY in exchange of removing Nutritional Value of the CheeseBurger in the article is a total NONO. It is absolutely not negociable. Imho, even putting an ad for the CheeseBurger on FastFood would be a very bad idea. ant

Sounds good. Contribute or suffer the ads. :) Steve

Your idealism and loyalty is laudable, but remember that in terms of quality, a teenager with a bit of Linux knowledge can download the whole lot for free and get it operational in an afternoon.* And I rather suspect that our "name recognition" is due more to being up near the top of Google search results than any other single factor. If Google developed their own product, I can confidently predict that it would be way cooler than WP, and that they would bump their own results above WP's in Google searches. Peter (Skyring) *dealing with success and bandwidth might be a problem, however

On 1/2/06, Peter Mackay &lt;peter.mackay(a)bigpond.com&gt; wrote: Very true, but McD's would open themselves up to potentially a whole lot of negative publicity that would make McLibel look trivial in comparison.

Peter Mackay wrote: That would be the "low-quality" clone. One Linux box is easily slashdotted; the current WP installation laughs at Slashdot, or so I'm told. Our teenager would have to buy 100+ machines and get them all working in concert before going live. Well, their motto is supposedly "don't be evil", but of course if they *were* truly evil, they would lie about their motto. :-) Stan

Although they are similar words, "quality" and "quantity" have different meanings. MediaWiki is robust high quality software and that's not going to change whether it's running on a laptop or a server farm. As I noted for this not so hypothetical teenager "*dealing with success and bandwidth might be a problem, however". Getting back to the original point, charging Google enough to keep WP running isn't going to do much beyond providing an incentive for Google to put up their own online encyclopaedia. I would imagine that if they were pressed, Google could get the MediaWiki software and Wikipedia content loaded and tested in a matter of days, if not hours, and alter their search results to give their "Googlopedia" a higher precedence than Wikipedia. We don't have any sort of "big stick" to threaten Google with. Peter (Skyring)

Stan Shebs wrote: Now you're sounding like Daniel Brandt... ;-) -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Why not? You think Google would have problems attracting editors? Peter

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: *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.

"Steve Bennett" wrote The problems with goal-directedness: it might actually matter how you get 'there'; and 'there' might not mean the same thing to everyone. In fact my wikimeet experience convinces me that the 'there' is not a large factor in people's motivation. They want the process to be fun, as in lively, making light of hassles, rewarding, that kind of thing. They want 'can do' as an attitude, but certainly not 'suits' and too much business talk. And these are the folk who actually write for hours, for nothing, to post the pages and turn the red links blue. Charles