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

[Robin Shannon]

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need
> to
> enter to help keep everything running.
>

This IS advertising. We are providing a link to a service that we will
get money from. We are not doing this for educational or whatever
reasons like in the external links section of articles, we are doing
it because it will (we hope) generate $$$s.

Three questions;

Surely the number of people who visit this tools page is going to be
miniscule (since most of our visitors, i presume, never leave the
article namespace) so will it actually generate any/much dosh? Are we
just being paid for 1-click tools downloaded via the wikipedia link,
or are we being paid for any 1-click tool used?

What is wrong with advertising? Web advertising has come a long way
since wikipedia was first founded. google and yahoo both offer text
adds that could be added somewhere on the page. We could almost
certainly negotiate a VERY good deal with yahoo or google to pay us
above normal price since the kind of content we offer is very suited
to text adds, and (if i understand alexia correctly) we account for a
tenth of a percent (and growing - if current growth continues we could
well soon be 1%) of all web traffic, an amount not to be scoffed at.
We could even provide an option for regular users to turn the adds
off. I agree with dan, that straight forward advertising like this
would be far better than stealth advertising which is what this
1-click deal really amounts to.

Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs
assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing
hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?

paz y amor,
-rjs.

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