[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it was rather presumptious of the board to "announce" this
> without consulting editors first. The board may have "signed up" to a
> trial of this, but *we* haven't, and I think the board may well have a
> hard time stopping editors removing this advertisting from the site.

And how exactly is this advertising? Simply saying something is so does not
make it so. 

We need to aggressively develop many more partnerships like this due to our
massively increasing costs. The entire budget for this year was about $700,000
with 70+% of that going to new hardware purchases. The year before the entire
budget was less than $200,000. 

Depending on just how exponential our growth continues to be, we will need to
purchase 2 million to 4 million dollars worth of hardware just to keep up next
year. Increase those figures by about 30% to arrive at a budget that *only*
covers our very basic operating costs. If we don't keep up, then the sites go
down. 

We also have a much larger goal than just keeping the websites up; to
distribute our content to the people who most need it. Money generated from
partnerships like the one we are going to test with Answers.com are needed to
help make that happen.

We have been small enough so far that we haven't really needed to form these
type of partnerships. That is no longer the case. 

-- mav


	
		
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