[WikiEN-l] Regarding Advertising on Wikipedia

[Jimmy Wales]

Just to be clear: I don't think advertising will ever be desirable or
necessary for Wikipedia.  Even so, I didn't buy all of Tony's
arguments against it, and wanted to comment accordingly.

Tony Wilson wrote:
> 1: Because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to stop a link
> between advertising and influence/control over content establishing
> itself. 

Well, the wiki system itself is a pretty big barrier to such a link.

> 2: Because in the post hi-tech stock market crash environment, on-line
> advertising rates often don't even pay for the bandwidth the ads
> consume.

Well, actually, advertising already pays for bandwidth and salaries
and everything else around here.  :-)

> 3: Because the small number of advertisers remaining take advantage of
> the buyers' market to demand (and get) unacceptable types of
> advertising, involving one or more usually all of the folowing
> obnoxious things: pop-ups, data-mining cookies, Shockwave, and Flash

The tide is turning, and strongly.  I think that Shockwave and Flash
are still on the rise, but still not all that common.  Popups are
paying less and less, to the point where we (Bomis) just dropped them
completely.  We have a new ad deal with a major search engine which
does context-relevant text ads -- it works great, and pays a lot more
than the intrusive stuff!

BUT -- the rest of his comments were correct!

--Jimbo