In a message dated 11/7/2010 3:19:19 PM Pacific Standard Time, wikimail@inbox.org writes:

Doesn't Google lets the advertiser pick which searches they want to appear on? Is that "manual", or "automagic"? Would letting the advertiser pick which articles they want to appear on be "manual", or "automagic"?

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

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If automagic worked, I would see ads for stuff I might have at least a passing interest in; I seldom do. But if I'm looking at an article on a book or an author I might well take a look at an ad page linked from it. I buy lots of books. If nothing else it would save a step or two.

With support for location targeting you could do even better. There are physicians who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on location targeted Google adwords, and they do so because the revenue they're generating from it is more than the cost.

I think this is all pretty much a nonstarter, though. Between the lack of support for ads in the community and the difficult hurdles that would need to be navigated to not get in trouble with the IRS, I don't see ads ever coming to Wikimedia Foundation websites.

When an advertiser picks which searches they want to appear on, this is handled by the customer. No time commitment from Google employees there. And this affects searches, not individual hand-picked end-user pages. Similarly, webcontent creators using Adsense, can block certain types of ads, or even certain advertisers, but again, this is done by the customer, so-to-speak, not by a Google-paid employee.

If there were a system created, where all the *effort* were off loaded to the payer, not the pay...ed, then you'd gain that financial benefit. The creation of such a system however, involves the effort of a much higher level of paid employee :)

So there you go. No free lunch.