[WikiEN-l] Google ads

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales at wikia.com
Wed Jul 14 13:24:36 UTC 2004


Kurt Jansson wrote:
> If we once *really* need the money we should use opt-out, but I hope this 
> will never happen.

I am of the opinion that we will never "need" the money.  I think the
challenge to the community is going to be from a different direction:
how much good could we do to further our goals as a charitable
institution, and does that good outweigh our distaste for advertising.

As a thought experiment, consider a day 2 years in the future when
Wikipedia is serving 1 billion pageviews per month, and we are
continuing to easily fund the site's growth through donations, grants,
etc.

A conservative estimate (in my experience, which is valid I think) of
how much revenue we could generate with Google Adwords or similar,
i.e. no banners, no flashing lights, no popups, would be around $1 per
thousand.  So a billion pageviews a month generates at least $1
million per month.  Even with the ability for people who hate ads to
opt-out with a single click, the revenue would be substantial.

For $12 million a year, how many millions of CDs could we make
available to charities building media centers in the slums of New
Delhi?  If we work wisely with for-profit or non-profit organizations
in developing countries, we can subsidize their production to leverage
their ability to profitably and sustainably make our work widely
available everywhere.

My dream is to create a comprehensive free encyclopedia to be
distributed at extremely low cost to them to every single person on
the planet.  Is our distaste for ads so high that we are willing to
deny the people who don't even have access to clean drinking water a
copy of a work that could help empower them to change their lives?

To sum up, I don't think we will ever "need" the money to keep doing
what we are doing.  But I think the day may come when we have to make
a very tough decision about what kind of good we could do with the
money.

I have my own opinion about what we should do when that day comes,
which you might or might not be able to glean from the above, but for
now I remain firmly opposed to advertising on Wikipedia, for all the
reasons that many people have already mentioned: credibility, good
taste, the feeling that we are doing something extra-ordinary, etc.

--Jimbo

p.s. Lest any trolls wants to make up some claims about this, let me
be perfectly clear.  If the day ever comes when we decide that we can
do so much good with advertising money that we should not turn it
down, that decision is not going to come top-down from me, but from
the community as a whole.



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