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

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/24/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Gah, I'm finding all this really weird.
>
> 1. We need money for servers and bandwidth
> 2. Currently, it comes from donations but people seem to be saying
> that's not sustainable
> 3. We've had a few big donations, but they could be time-limited (will
> Yahoo want their servers back?) and they don't happen often
> 4. One proposal is a small link to a small tool which probably won't
> generate much money, so is no solution by itself
> 5. There's a few other ideas which show promise, but not a lot in
> terms of delivering hard cash
> 6. Adsense could give us stacks of cash
>
> Surely there's only a handful of logical conclusions here:
>
> 1. We stay with just donations (small private and few large coporate
> ones) and the site slowly bogs down as traffic demand outstrips server
> supply
> 2. We try more small stuff like the Amazon and the forthcoming 1-Click
> experiments, but let's be honest unless WP is plastered in them
> they'll never make much of a difference
> 3. We eventually accept a small amount of Adsense (or Adsense-syle)
> advertising on the site, which will most likely pay for what we need.
>
>
> Dan

 I'd add 4) We build a system which automatically scales along with the
demand, such as a P2P system based on something like BitTorrent. And I'd
subtract 1 and 2 for the reasons you've essentially given (we don't want WP
pastered in small stuff, and we don't want the site to bog down).