[Foundation-l] Left on the Table

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 11:38, Peter Coombe <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Wikimedia organizations (WMF and chapters) don't have capacity to
spend $100M now; it will have it in few of years. And money from
fundraising is increasing well, which means that $100M will be reached
probably in that amount of time.

> 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

Fred said that annual revenue is estimated on $500M. I would say that
the potential is much higher and that it is comparable with a
developing country with 10-20M of inhabitants.

However, unlike three years ago, we are now in the phase when other
factors are much more important than money. Structuring the network of
organizations and global movement itself is much more important than
getting money which is not possible to spend in this moment of time.