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

[Dori]

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that
> > we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't
> > think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the
> > risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on
> > advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.
>
> Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online,
> but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by
> an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month
> for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads.

Don't you think for a moment that we would have this kind of traffic
and growth if we had full blown advertising on the site. And my
comment was only in regard to this deal.

<snip...>
> > It would help to keep features from creeping in that
> > require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of
> > templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of
> > what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some
> > with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when
> > you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an
> > article into a category to begin with).
>
> Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving
> hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.
>
> -- mav

I'll let the techs speak to that, but I can't see how additional
traffic coupled with additional load-generating features can help.
Cached traffic I imagine comprises most of the readership, and I doubt
that's what's causing the purchase of more and more hardware.

--
Dori