[Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion

[Ziko van Dijk]

Thank you, Michael, for your critical note on the assertations
concerning the huge sums of money. I didn't stand still at the fact
that most of our Wikipedia pages have very low click rates. -
Recently I read that 4% of our pages cause 50% of our traffic.

The idea of Liam is interesting that we could have adverts on Special
pages because those are genereated automatically. In Germany there was
a discussion about adverts on www.wikipedia.de (which is owned by
WMDE, unlike de.wikipedia.org).

But even then, I am afraid, people will say anyway that there are "ads
on Wikipedia" with the negative consequences for our reputation. And
people might think that they don't have to donate anymore because
Wikimedia makes money otherwise.

The biggest danger remains the repercussions on our editing community.
A loss of even "only" 10-20% of our power users would be very
negative, especially in the smaller language communities.

Personally, I am not such an opponent of adverts in general, and I
would not mind to have a Wikimedia large voting on the subject. This
should be only undertaken, nonetheless, if there is a substantial
group of Wikimedians who really wants to go the advertising way.

Kind regards
Ziko


2010/11/8 Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com>:
> On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote:
>> As for  tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at
>> least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS
>> positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank
>> wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long
>> time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely
>> that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's
>> traffic.
> I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately
> anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic
> in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for
> good or ill.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Niederlande