LittleDan wrote:
Why does everyone oppose advertizing? I it's descrete enough, it's not intrusive and doesn't lower our credibility.
I'll give you 10 reasons.
1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link between advertising and influence/control over content establishing itself.
2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads consume.
3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash
4: Because users have to pay per MB bandwidth charges to look at ads they don't want to see.
5: Because many of our best contributors will walk out in disgust
6: Because a lot of contrbutors are doing a lot of hard work to create a non-commercial resource of real value. If someone comes along and says, "oh no, all those countless hours you donated to a free comunity project, well, one day I'm going to turn around and use your sweat to make a dollar" then my contribution stops right here and right now. Ditto for a lot of other people. And if Jimbo pulls the pin one day and we need money to keep going, then I'll put my hand in my pocket and help out. Better yet, I'll just provide the hardware, and let some other people pitch in to provide the bandwidth. (I own a computer shop: I have any amount of hardware.)
7: Because a site that carries advertising, even if i is still run on a non-profit basis, would find it much more difficult to persuade people to release material to it, in particular images.
8: Because the relentless urge some people have to commercialise every last damn thing on the planet is personally offensive: to me, and to a great many other people - especially the sort of people who love Wikipedia
9: Because this is an encyclopedia, not a second-rate imitation of Encarta
10: Just because
Tannin
--- Tony Wilson list@redhill.net.au wrote:
LittleDan wrote:
Why does everyone oppose advertizing? I it's descrete enough, it's not intrusive and doesn't lower our credibility.
I'll give you 10 reasons.
Nice! Maybe you should add them to [[m:Advertising on Wikipedia]].
4: Because users have to pay per MB bandwidth charges to look at ads they don't want to see.
This seems to me the most concise one: ads on the site mean that the site would not be "free" anymore. People would have to pay indirectly both with dollars and with annoyance/distraction.
Axel
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Just to be clear: I don't think advertising will ever be desirable or necessary for Wikipedia. Even so, I didn't buy all of Tony's arguments against it, and wanted to comment accordingly.
Tony Wilson wrote:
1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link between advertising and influence/control over content establishing itself.
Well, the wiki system itself is a pretty big barrier to such a link.
2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads consume.
Well, actually, advertising already pays for bandwidth and salaries and everything else around here. :-)
3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash
The tide is turning, and strongly. I think that Shockwave and Flash are still on the rise, but still not all that common. Popups are paying less and less, to the point where we (Bomis) just dropped them completely. We have a new ad deal with a major search engine which does context-relevant text ads -- it works great, and pays a lot more than the intrusive stuff!
BUT -- the rest of his comments were correct!
--Jimbo