Fred Bauder How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year?
Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of sites rank highly.
If you seriously want to make a reasonable estimate, take a look at the closest similar types of sites which are commercial - e.g. about.com, answers.com, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo.com, Gawker (sorry!), etc. That would give a ballpark figure in terms of current Google practice.
Skip the feel-good stuff about the community only being willing to do free work for an unsullied cause. The veritable Co-Founder Himself has a $14 million dollar venture-capital backed endeavor (Wikia) based on the theory that such an idea is false. Are you calling him and his marquee investors stupid? :-)
In fact, Wikia's relative lack of profitability (it may be slightly profitable, but it's certainly not a money machine) is a pretty good indication that such monetization is quite difficult. Even with all the marketing and public relations advantages that Wikia gains via a "halo effect" from Wikipedia's prominence, it still doesn't rake in big bucks.
So slapping a Google Ads box on many pages doesn't print money. Given the risk that it could actually kill the goose that lays golden "SERPs", err, eggs, it won't happen.
On 6 November 2010 01:20, Seth Finkelstein sethf@sethf.com wrote:
Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of sites rank highly.
Err from google's POV it's in their financial interest for sights that feature their ads to be high in the SERPS. Large numbers of people going to a site which doesn't host their ads means large numbers of lost clicks on google ads.
As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic.
On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote:
As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic.
I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for good or ill.
--Michael Snow
Thank you, Michael, for your critical note on the assertations concerning the huge sums of money. I didn't stand still at the fact that most of our Wikipedia pages have very low click rates. - Recently I read that 4% of our pages cause 50% of our traffic.
The idea of Liam is interesting that we could have adverts on Special pages because those are genereated automatically. In Germany there was a discussion about adverts on www.wikipedia.de (which is owned by WMDE, unlike de.wikipedia.org).
But even then, I am afraid, people will say anyway that there are "ads on Wikipedia" with the negative consequences for our reputation. And people might think that they don't have to donate anymore because Wikimedia makes money otherwise.
The biggest danger remains the repercussions on our editing community. A loss of even "only" 10-20% of our power users would be very negative, especially in the smaller language communities.
Personally, I am not such an opponent of adverts in general, and I would not mind to have a Wikimedia large voting on the subject. This should be only undertaken, nonetheless, if there is a substantial group of Wikimedians who really wants to go the advertising way.
Kind regards Ziko
2010/11/8 Michael Snow wikipedia@frontier.com:
On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote:
As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic.
I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for good or ill.
--Michael Snow
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