Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I think we're talking about more than "a few cents from Google ads."
Indeed. Just to set the context, it seems that we are currently publishing around 360 million pageviews per month. At a conservative estimate of $1 per thousand (that's about half what I think is actually likely), we are currently implicitly turning down $360,000 per month.
See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm (12.0M * 30 = 360M)
From October 2003 through June 2004, our traffic grew by a factor of
10. By my rough calculation, if we continue to grow at that rate, we will be pushing 1 billion pageviews per month in just over 100 days from now.
We are not actually likely to keep growing at that rate for a few reasons.
First, our growth has to level off at some point. Has to, dammit! :-) Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
Second, our ability with a volunteer staff and donations for hardware to *quickly* increase capacity is limited. We will likely remain hardware-bound for some time to come.
Nonetheless, at the present time, I remain opposed to having advertisements on Wikipedia.
--Jimbo