[Foundation-l] Benefits of advertising (was Our exponentially increasing costs)

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/27/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 27/10/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think recent discussion on en: re the Answers.com <http://Answers.com>deal has
> > established that if we put ads on en: Wikipedia, a significant
> > proportion of contributors will feel sufficiently betrayed and ripped
> > off to get up and *leave*. Certainly enough to start a viable fork.
> > For no good reason of operating policy, and to the detriment of both
> > forks.
>
> I wonder how they'd pay for their fork...
>
> I've said it before and I'll say it again, if the choice is between a
> website with ads and no site at all, I'll take ads.


The thing is, when (and if) it gets to that point, there will be ads. If one
quarter the budget target is missed, and the hardware needed to run the site
well is gone, and the quality of the site starts to seriously decline (down
50% of the time or something), there are only really two possibilities:

1) Ads come, and some people leave, trying to make an ad-free fork.

2) Ads don't come, and some people leave, trying to make ad-full fork.

At the point, if it ever comes, that it becomes clear that the site can't
run solely on donations, the argument for ads will be much stronger, there
probably will be few people who would leave, and probably the majority would
be in favor of turning on the ads.

It'd be nice if we could switch before then, because there are a lot of
better things we can do with the donation money than run a website, but it
isn't absolutely necessary.