Kurt Jansson wrote:
The ability to tell journalists "Wikipedia is completly free of advertising" is worth more than a few cents from Google ads, IMHO. With ads, even if opt-in, we are much less of a bird of paradise in the web's top 1000. And there might also be a negative psychological effect on the donors.
I think we're talking about more than "a few cents from Google ads." I was talking awhile back with the guy who created envirolink.org. They started running Google ads awhile ago, and I was surprised when he told me how much money the ads were bringing in. I forget the amount, but as I recall it was more than $1,000 per month. And for Wikipedia, which gets a lot more traffic than Envirolink, I think the revenues would likely be greater.
I you want to see how the ads look on envirolink, here's the URL:
Of all the advertising I've seen on the web, the Google ads are the most tasteful and least intrusive. They're text-based ads, which means little use of bandwidth. They're topic-relevant. (The ads on envirolink.org all have something to do with the environment.) They're clearly labeled as advertising, and they can placed in a position on the page where they don't overwhelm its editorial content. Also, it is possible to reject advertising deemed inappropriate. (The envirolink webmaster told me that they have rejected attempts by anti-environmental organizations to place ads on their website.)
As for the value of the ability to tell journalists that Wikipedia is completely free of advertising, what value is that exactly? Most journalists work themselves for publications that rely on advertising for part of their revenue. I happen to work as a journalist for an organization that does not accept advertising or corporate contributions, but we're the exception, not the rule, and the reason we follow this policy is because our specific mission is to act as a critical watchdog of corporate and government propaganda.
As far as credibility with journalists is concerned, the issues are:
(1) Would acceptance of advertising diminish the independence and integrity of Wikipedia's non-advertising content? For this to be the case, we would have to imagine a scenario in which Wikipedia users shy away from adding certain types of content out of fear that it would offend an advertiser. Given the way that Wikipedia operates, I think this scenario is unlikely.
(2) Is there a danger that visitors would confuse advertising with editorial content? I think this danger is actually small.
(3) Is there transparent disclosure of the relationship between Google and Wikipedia? This should be pretty easy too. Every Google ad comes with a link at the top that says, "Ads by Google." Clicking on that llink opens a page that explains how the advertising works.
--Sheldon Rampton
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I think we're talking about more than "a few cents from Google ads."
Indeed. Just to set the context, it seems that we are currently publishing around 360 million pageviews per month. At a conservative estimate of $1 per thousand (that's about half what I think is actually likely), we are currently implicitly turning down $360,000 per month.
See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm (12.0M * 30 = 360M)
From October 2003 through June 2004, our traffic grew by a factor of
10. By my rough calculation, if we continue to grow at that rate, we will be pushing 1 billion pageviews per month in just over 100 days from now.
We are not actually likely to keep growing at that rate for a few reasons.
First, our growth has to level off at some point. Has to, dammit! :-) Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
Second, our ability with a volunteer staff and donations for hardware to *quickly* increase capacity is limited. We will likely remain hardware-bound for some time to come.
Nonetheless, at the present time, I remain opposed to having advertisements on Wikipedia.
--Jimbo
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
First, our growth has to level off at some point. Has to, dammit! :-) Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
I can see 500 million hits per day (15 billion hits per month) by year's end (especially just leading to and around the elections). That would put us squarely in the top 10 on the internet.
Of course, now may be the time to talk to IBM about those mainframe donations.
The W has achieved enormous press coverage in the last year and now the completeness level is good enough that for all practical purposes for the average person, we have articles on everything.
Can you name another computer-based project (beside IE's vulnerabilities) that gets as much "good" press coverage as we do?
I suggest the ride is going to get even more fun.
People: Send in your donation, we have to ramp up.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
First, our growth has to level off at some point. Has to, dammit! :-) Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
I've been meaning to find a peg to hang the following post on ever since I lost the post with mav's original 90% growth projections on:
All the evidence (see below) suggests that Wikipedia has *not* grown by a significant amount since the huge explosion in February/March 2004.
Now we have had a myriad of technical issues, and perhaps had reached capacity to prevent growth (until the most recent db master/slave setup). These are clearly key factors and I am expecting big growth in July.
''However'' I do not think it is a coincidence that this four months of little growth corresponds almost exactly with the period that Wikipedia has "disappered" from Google.
This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news (where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.
Assuming few technical restrictions, Wikipedia will grow, but I really think it will be at the low-end of Mav's predictions.
Pete/Pcb21 (knowing that people have been wrong on this before, but sticking the neck out anyway)
== Data == (en only in places)
As far as I know there are three places to get information about the growth of Wikipedia.
1) The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
The daily average visits for the past months are:
Jul 2004 270339 Jun 2004 295800 May 2004 274077 Apr 2004 189930 Mar 2004 280845 Feb 2004 265556
There has not been much change in these -
(there has been change in some of the other statistics - I would need a tech to tell me what effect the new software had on this)
2) The Wikipedia Statistics pages (http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
Feb 2004 741 new wikipedians 536 new articles (per day) Mar 2004 824 new wikipedians 688 new articles Apr 2004 689 new wikipedians 627 new articles May 2004 615 new wikipedians 581 new articles Jun 2004 326 new wikipedians 475 new articles
3) Alexa
- see the following graph http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=lar... which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.
Pete, I think you're not reading the evidence correctly, but I think that we need to make sure we get this right. Forecasting the future is tricky enough, and we can only do it well if we understand the past.
So I invite real scrutiny of all these numbers, because I really need to know the right answer.
- The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
Look at pageviews per day... February 2004 3.01 million June 2004, 5.28 million
For the intervening months, there are significant problems with the averages due to some missing data. (For example, several days in April are in the dataset and part of the denominator but clearly have missing data, for example showing 94 pageviews in a day.)
Additionally, it is a very big mistake when talking about growth to focus solely on en. En is not the fastest growing wikipedia, in terms of traffic percentages.
You can see the growth better here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
Notice in particular the dramatic spike in June which is continuing unabated into July. This spike, I believe, corresponds with the acquisition of new servers.
- The Wikipedia Statistics pages
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
A better page (to get the global perspective) is here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm
It does seem true that the number of new wikipedians peaked in March, but notice the big spike in de.wikipedia which distorts the statistic to some degree. en has experienced similar spikes before, and the subsequent decline after a spike was not indicative of the long term trend, which continues generally to be strongly positive.
- Alexa
- see the following graph
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=lar... which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.
Given that we know traffic has more than doubled in that time frame, this bears taking a closer look.
I think this picture is more informative: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=lar...
Here, you have to remember that the chart is logarithmic, *and* that increases in rank require different increases in traffic as different scales. That is, to go from #10,000 to #1,000 is less of an achievement than to go from #1,000 to #100. (Almost any website can spike into the top 1,000 if it gets press coverage of the right sort.)
Look at that picture and recognize that if we blipped up to #1, it would look like a minor blip, due to the logarithmic nature of the chart.
Alexa shows our 3 mos change as being +86 (in rank), and since we are already in the ballpark of 600, that representents a substantial traffic increase.
And finally, Alexa numbers are fun to look at, but they do not accurately represent real traffic numbers. If you look up Bomis on there, you'll see a precipitous decline -- but from our perspective (at Bomis), traffic was stable for that same time period. (Of course being stable while everyone else is growing is one possible explanation, but another explanation is that Alexa stats are questionable anyway.)
After a chat with the developers yesterday, I'm comfortable (for now) with the number of 360 million pageviews per month. If that's wrong, I need to know soon, because I'm going to say that number in public.
--Jimbo
Thanks for the reply Jimmy.
I can imagine how it is very important to get the figures right, and with all the different data we are seeing, the maxim "lies, damn lies and statistics" never seemed truer!
1) I absolutely agree that I shouldn't have concentrated only en. Overall growth is higher than en growth
2) I would like to be able to trust the webalizers stats more. The figures seem do seem to be a bit all over the place. The following annualized figures show the different growth rates for the different statistics from February to July
By hits: 999% annually By files: 1095% annually By pages: 257% annually By visits: 9% annually
The same figures from March to July
By hits: 1049% annually By files: 996% annually By pages: 860% annually By visits: -6% annually
I do not know how to reconcile the hits/files/pages with the visits figures. I guess you covered that with your chat with the developers yesterday?
Over the same period of time, the number of active wikipedians (i.e. wikipedians making 5 edits or more) is, as we agree, roughly stable (since the huge jump at the end of February). ''If'' we make the assumption that no. of wikipedians is constantly proportional to the number of visitors, then these growth rates (>800%) can not be true. Now it stands to reason that over time, as the encyclopedias mature, the visitor to editor ratio should increase. But by that much? By instincts say no.
Alexa has problems to be sure. Looking at a spread of sites, it appears that virtually all English language sites are going down, at the expense of a mix of sino-japanese sites. This is likely to reflect how the alexa toolbar is distributed more than anything else. In that sense WP may be doing extremely by staying more or less constant for the last three or four months (that does appear to be the case even taking into logarithms - the +86 appears to be the change in the last three months average against the previous three months - i.e. comparing Jan-March to April-June which seems ok), WP is "swimming against the tide" and doing well.
Key conclusion: We still have growth, it is rapid, it is still limited by server capacity more than a limit to natural demand. However the 90% per quarter (1300% per year) estimate seems too excessive.
Pete
p.s. I agree with the other posters that it is great (in one sense) that the mirrors are "shouldering the burden". Would "360 million pageviews per month, probably at least half a billion when other users of our free content are taken into account, extremely confident it will be a billion by Christmas" be snappy enough for journalists?
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Pete, I think you're not reading the evidence correctly, but I think that we need to make sure we get this right. Forecasting the future is tricky enough, and we can only do it well if we understand the past.
So I invite real scrutiny of all these numbers, because I really need to know the right answer.
- The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
Look at pageviews per day... February 2004 3.01 million June 2004, 5.28 million
For the intervening months, there are significant problems with the averages due to some missing data. (For example, several days in April are in the dataset and part of the denominator but clearly have missing data, for example showing 94 pageviews in a day.)
Additionally, it is a very big mistake when talking about growth to focus solely on en. En is not the fastest growing wikipedia, in terms of traffic percentages.
You can see the growth better here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
Notice in particular the dramatic spike in June which is continuing unabated into July. This spike, I believe, corresponds with the acquisition of new servers.
- The Wikipedia Statistics pages
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
A better page (to get the global perspective) is here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm
It does seem true that the number of new wikipedians peaked in March, but notice the big spike in de.wikipedia which distorts the statistic to some degree. en has experienced similar spikes before, and the subsequent decline after a spike was not indicative of the long term trend, which continues generally to be strongly positive.
- Alexa
- see the following graph
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=lar... which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.
Given that we know traffic has more than doubled in that time frame, this bears taking a closer look.
I think this picture is more informative: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=lar...
Here, you have to remember that the chart is logarithmic, *and* that increases in rank require different increases in traffic as different scales. That is, to go from #10,000 to #1,000 is less of an achievement than to go from #1,000 to #100. (Almost any website can spike into the top 1,000 if it gets press coverage of the right sort.)
Look at that picture and recognize that if we blipped up to #1, it would look like a minor blip, due to the logarithmic nature of the chart.
Alexa shows our 3 mos change as being +86 (in rank), and since we are already in the ballpark of 600, that representents a substantial traffic increase.
And finally, Alexa numbers are fun to look at, but they do not accurately represent real traffic numbers. If you look up Bomis on there, you'll see a precipitous decline -- but from our perspective (at Bomis), traffic was stable for that same time period. (Of course being stable while everyone else is growing is one possible explanation, but another explanation is that Alexa stats are questionable anyway.)
After a chat with the developers yesterday, I'm comfortable (for now) with the number of 360 million pageviews per month. If that's wrong, I need to know soon, because I'm going to say that number in public.
--Jimbo
On 15 Jul 2004 at 8:09, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Pete, I think you're not reading the evidence correctly, but I think that we need to make sure we get this right. Forecasting the future is tricky enough, and we can only do it well if we understand the past.
So I invite real scrutiny of all these numbers, because I really need to know the right answer.
- The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
Look at pageviews per day... February 2004 3.01 million June 2004, 5.28 million
For the intervening months, there are significant problems with the averages due to some missing data. (For example, several days in April are in the dataset and part of the denominator but clearly have missing data, for example showing 94 pageviews in a day.)
[snip]
Notice in particular the dramatic spike in June which is continuing unabated into July. This spike, I believe, corresponds with the acquisition of new servers.
I'm with Pete in the view that Wikipedia overall is growing very slowly at the moment and has been since February/March this year. The big jump in hits seems to have occurred in the last week (week 22) of May 2004. See the monthly and yearly charts at http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits.html
Now this big jump coincides with the upgrade to monobook. Looking at the chart you will see the traffic ramps up over the space of about a week or so, this corresponds with the piecemeal fashion that the different languages were upgraded to monobook in the last day on May.
Before monobook each page load without graphics caused four hits - the page itself, the logo graphic, a style sheet and a javascript file. With monobook this number has increased the exact number depends on the browser configuration. But will include several stylesheets, one or two javascript files, the logo image, the background image, the user icon, the list item icon, the gfdl and media wiki logos.
Just as a test loading the main page on English Wikipedia under Internet Explorer 6.0 results in 24 hits to the server. Now of course some client side caching will occur so it will not a have a massive effect on the stats, but I still believe it would be big enough to account for the 2 to 3 times increase that happened.
I believe the actual number of visits to Wikipedia since about March has stayed the same or grown very little. Since June both the Webalizer and cache stats are very flat except for the standard weekly cycle (low weekend, high mid week).
As for the Webalizer "pages" statistic, I believe that some non-pages are incorrectly being counted as pages. But without analysing Webalizers configuration and the log files themselves I can't say for sure what exactly is happening.
Richard
--- Richard Gallagher rbg@cvm.co.nz wrote:
I'm with Pete in the view that Wikipedia overall is growing very slowly at the moment and has been since February/March this year. The big jump in hits seems to have occurred in the last week (week 22) of May 2004. See the monthly and yearly charts at http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/org.wikimedia.all.squid.requests-hits.html
Now this big jump coincides with the upgrade to monobook. Looking at the chart you will see the traffic ramps up over the space of about a week or so, this corresponds with the piecemeal fashion that the different languages were upgraded to monobook in the last day on May.
Before monobook each page load without graphics caused four hits - the page itself, the logo graphic, a style sheet and a javascript file. With monobook this number has increased the exact number depends on the browser configuration. But will include several stylesheets, one or two javascript files, the logo image, the background image, the user icon, the list item icon, the gfdl and media wiki logos.
This is all very useful info. Thank you. However I made the error in calling page requests hits. These are the data I've been using for the model:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
I would like to know just how much those extra page requests actually impact the servers. They must have some performance effect, otherwise there would be no need to buy anything but replacement servers at this point (seeing that visits are actually a bit down).
It could be that about the same number of people are using us far more heavily, or that the stats have drifted for some reason related to the upgrade and are thus screwing with the model.
As for the Webalizer "pages" statistic, I believe that some non-pages are incorrectly being counted as pages. But without analysing Webalizers configuration and the log files themselves I can't say for sure what exactly is happening.
If somebody could do that, then that would help a great deal with forecasting.
-- Daniel
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Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news (where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.
But... think about it... what we want is information to be made available... after all, this is what mirrors are offering... they distribute information, and relieve our servers.
Hum ?
--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches.
Now our
mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking
news
(where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the
"second
generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming"
the
Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the
older
mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.
But... think about it... what we want is information to be made available... after all, this is what mirrors are offering... they distribute information, and relieve our servers.
Hum ?
Ant has a point. Let them pay for the bandwidth and the servers.
Of course, I would send them the "be a Wikipedia Donor" letter first.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:36:20 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com wrote:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
First, our growth has to level off at some point. Has to, dammit! :-) Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
I can see 500 million hits per day (15 billion hits per month) by year's end (especially just leading to and around the elections). That would put us squarely in the top 10 on the internet.
Of course, now may be the time to talk to IBM about those mainframe donations.
Is there any further info on that? Has any "official" discussion taken place between wikimedia and IBM/Apple/Sun/Whoever about something like that? I bet some of them would love to pay for something like that for a bit of karma boost
The W has achieved enormous press coverage in the last year and now the completeness level is good enough that for all practical purposes for the average person, we have articles on everything.
Can you name another computer-based project (beside IE's vulnerabilities) that gets as much "good" press coverage as we do?
I suggest the ride is going to get even more fun.
People: Send in your donation, we have to ramp up.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I you want to see how the ads look on envirolink, here's the URL:
I also see the they have a "PayPal donate" logo at the bottom of that page.
Ec
Sheldon Rampton schrieb:
I think we're talking about more than "a few cents from Google ads."
I was talking about revenues from the suggested opt-in ads, sorry if that wasn't clear.
Of all the advertising I've seen on the web, the Google ads are the most tasteful and least intrusive.
I can second that. If we want ads, then we should use Google for that.
As for the value of the ability to tell journalists that Wikipedia is completely free of advertising, what value is that exactly?
It's mostly about credibility. They don't have to ask me "is there really no one in the background making money with the site?" and "do the ads really not influence what people write on Wikipedia?". There are no ads - it's that easy at the moment.
And of course a new visitor would ask the same questions. Lesser people will write articles or donate money with every bit of credibility we loose. There will be "clean" forks the very next day after the implementation of ads.
It might be worth it in the future, the sums Jimbo is talking about are really tempting because you could do so much good with them. But I'm very sceptic. It's good that we don't have to decide on this in the near future.
As far as credibility with journalists is concerned, the issues are: [...]
You're right, I guess, but this is less about hard facts but more about the spirit in the community (of authors and readers). The project *will* change significantly with the introduction of ads, and if you sum up all the effects and new possibilities I don't know if it's more for the good or the bad.
Kurt
Hi,
Why not create a account for Wikipedia and publish the id of the accout. So everyone who is interested to support Wikipedia can add google-adsense to their website. Specially for mirrors that would be a nice idea without much work for the webmasters.
ciao, tom
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:39:13AM +0200, Thomas R. Koll wrote:
Hi,
Why not create a account for Wikipedia and publish the id of the accout. So everyone who is interested to support Wikipedia can add google-adsense to their website. Specially for mirrors that would be a nice idea without much work for the webmasters.
And additionally users can add some JavaScript code to their User/monobook.js to opt-in the adds if the really want to.
ciao, tom
I think this is an excellent idea. I will have Terry look into it.
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
Hi,
Why not create a account for Wikipedia and publish the id of the accout. So everyone who is interested to support Wikipedia can add google-adsense to their website. Specially for mirrors that would be a nice idea without much work for the webmasters.
ciao, tom
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I thought initially it would be a fun experiment to try opt-in ads; but I have been convinced it would have a real negative impact on the community. I would still like to be able to browse a Google Ad-enabled mirror... as long as I knew I was supporting the project.
This is an elegant solution. Can we do the same with the Amazon account that used to be associated with ISBNs?
+Sj+
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
Hi,
Why not create a account for Wikipedia and publish the id of the accout. So everyone who is interested to support Wikipedia can add google-adsense to their website. Specially for mirrors that would be a nice idea without much work for the webmasters.
ciao, tom
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:56:40 -0400, Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
I thought initially it would be a fun experiment to try opt-in ads; but I have been convinced it would have a real negative impact on the community.
Random thought anyway. If we have any ads, and we want to make turning them off as easy as possible- we could just have a button above the ads that says "turn off ads". That should a) set a prefrence if the user is logged in, *and* b) set a cookie that tells us to turn off ads, even should they log out.