On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.
Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online, but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads.
Don't you think for a moment that we would have this kind of traffic and growth if we had full blown advertising on the site. And my comment was only in regard to this deal.
<snip...>
It would help to keep features from creeping in that require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an article into a category to begin with).
Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.
-- mav
I'll let the techs speak to that, but I can't see how additional traffic coupled with additional load-generating features can help. Cached traffic I imagine comprises most of the readership, and I doubt that's what's causing the purchase of more and more hardware.
-- Dori