On 12/30/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
The entire issue of advertisements is vexatious.
It's easy to see that
the kind of money that advertising would bring would soon bring an end
to worries about having enough hardware. But after all that hardware is
purchased there would be plenty left over, we would be left with a big
bank account full of problems. Would we hire new staff? To do what?
Who among the longtime committed would not feel a twinge of envy if some
newcomer were suddenly hired to be the new Larry Sanger? We would soon
learn how many of our active members really live on a shoestring. Maybe
we could fund everybody's attendance at the next Wikimania, or we could
fund third world projects consistent with a wider vision of bringing
knowledge to the most remote corners of the world. Or will someone else
see us as the deep pocket that can easily be picked in the courts?
I don't know. Sometimes having too much money can be a bigger problem
than having too little.
Ec
I dunno, I don't think it'd be so hard to spend the money. There are
billions of people in the world. The mission of Wikipedia is to
distribute an encyclopedia to every single of them. I'm going to be
bold and make the claim that distribution alone is going to cost
billions of dollars.
Granted, that doesn't mean Wikipedia has to spend all that money
itself. Partnering up with other companies and non-profit
organizations to do the distribution might be smarter. Even using
peer-to-peer distribution channels can work in many areas. But there
are plenty of positive ways to spend money.
There are plenty of negative ways too.
And actually, I'm not 100% convinced that the WMF *can* make hundreds
of millions of dollars off of advertising without jeopardising its
charity status. I've read in IRS documents that advertising revenue
is generally considered unrelated business income. Rely too much on
unrelated business income, and you're no longer a charity. I went to
Guidestar and read the 990s for the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and WHYY, INC (a PBS
affiliate), because WHYY most definitely does have advertising on
their service, but I haven't been able to figure out how they're
classifying their advertising income, and why. Of course even that is
different from the Wikipedia situation if Wikipedia chooses to use
advertising revenue from web to fund non-web projects.
I just found something else. "PBS ENTERPRISES, INC., a wholly-owned
for-profit subsidiary of PBS, was incorporated in December 1984. PBS
ENTERPRISES, INC., was organized to pursue revenue-producing projects
and services as part of an ongoing effort to increase public
television's financial base." Looking further, apparently the Mozilla
Corporation was created for similar reasons.
If the WMF wants to create a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary which
would run a mirror-site with ads, I don't really see how anyone could
have a problem with that.
Anthony