[Foundation-l] A modest proposal: ads on wikipedia.com

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 4/23/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is lots of empty screen space on the left, below the interwiki
> links.  Text-only boxes that match the color scheme are only minimally
> distracting.  I'm vaguely uncomfortable with putting ads up, but I
> think it could be done in ways that are minimally invasive.

and I hate to say it, but my personal view is that  adwords would
likely be more useful and relevant to many readers than the external
links sections on many of enwiki's articles.

It is true that this is more a negative comment about the degree of
editorial oversight over our external links sections, than a reason to
do ads...   But really, there is no discussion about "ads on
Wikipedia" because Wikipedia is already filled with ads.  The question
is about  also running ads which fund the foundation's mission and
which are clearly separated from the content and minimize the
introduction of bias.

It certainly would be nice if we had a good model for operational
sustainability, but with individual donations as a function of
pageviews decreasing and no reasonable expectation of increasing
growth allowing us to reach lower incremental costs of growth (we're
already paying rock bottom prices for bandwidth and hardware), we
*will* need to get creative if we ever want to do anything more than
operate the worlds largest game of [[nomic]] and maybe if we intend to
keep running at all.