[Foundation-l] Left on the Table

[Peter Coombe]

On 6 November 2010 03:43, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 00:53, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>> An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven:
>>> How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the
>>> table each year?
>>>
>>> Fred
>>
>> According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of
>> 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to
>> Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is
>> US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an
>> extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value.
>> Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and
>> ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and
>> interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand
>> Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive
>> ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has
>> (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just
>> a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue
>> as Facebook without additional employees.
>>
>> Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable.
>
> Thanks for making approximation!
>
> I was thinking that WMF and chapters would have much more money with
> ads. However, ~$100M is not so bigger amount than $20-22M. Besides
> that, all chapters except WM DE are far from reaching the limits
> (while WM DE is not so close to reach the limits). Also, organizations
> should have capacities to spend money, which should be built through
> the time.
>
> In other words, it seems that we definitely don't need ads.

No, we don't *need* ads. But think how much we could improve our
infrastructure and software with that money. Think how much content we
could help to free. And think how much more international we could
become. Personally I think the sacrifice we'd make by advertising is
too great, but you have to at least admit it's a tempting proposition.

Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006.
Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to
$100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-30/Wikipedia_valuation

Pete / the wub