At 2004-01-02 02:22, Thomas R. Koll wrote:
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 01:47:00AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
Jaap-
It seems that paying for the hardware and bandwidth can be done by the authors, but I don't think it should. The readers should pay for it, either directly or by having to lookat/ignore advertisements.
Fundraising is perfectly fine. People will just have to get used to it. We'll do it once a year and cover our operating costs that way. Sure, Google text-ads aren't too bad, but if we can easily do without them, why bother?
One could test the ads on a inofficial mirror, every money that's not need to operate the mirror could be given to Wikimedia. That would be a good and semi-official method.
For the average visitor the difference between an official and unofficial site is very unclear, because (if I may transpose the statistics of my own site here) about 50% of the people come in via search engines and they will regard whatever of the mirror sites they found first, as the original site.
My own site is being mirrored about 25 times all over the world, so I know a lot about what mirroring entails.
Just try advertising using Google Adsense on certain categories of (perhaps statistically relevant) pages. If it wasn't so easy to do I'd offer to help... ;-)
Greetings, Jaap