--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Kurt Jansson wrote: 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.
I think we can do all we want to do through donations and grants. If we are going to have any kind of advertising ever, then, IMO, it should be limited to a newsletter/WikiReader (ala National Geographic) sent to our millions of subscriber-donors. An additional idea would be to have a separate website where we post vetted article/book versions alongside Google ads (all the editing would still be at the ad-free Wikipedia and other wiki projects).
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.
I certainly hope it will only be 1 billion page views a month, since my projection of 'business as usual' (meaning 90% traffic growth compounded quarterly) has us at more than 135 billion hits per month by the end of 2006.
See http://meta.wikimedia.org/upload/0/07/Hardware_costs_-_year.pdf
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.
And so could the risks to our community and all we have built. But if and when we are presented with the choice between closing shop and having Google ads, then and *only* then should we seriously consider it. All my opinion, of course. There are many millions of dollars available in grants that we not even looked at yet.
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.
I share this dream and I do believe we can achieve it in a reasonable timeframe without taking shortcuts through bad parts of town (which is how I view advertising on the wikis).
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?
I personally don't have a distaste for ads - they just annoy me a bit. But I do have a distaste for the thought of forks such as with Enciclopedia Libre. This is especially dangerous now that chapters are being set-up that could fund a successful fork.
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.
It may indeed. Let's try to exhaust all other funding options first. If we find that doesn't work, or if the amount of money is only good enough to keep the website up and little else, then we can seriously consider ads on Wikipedia and the other project wikis. But we *must* demonstrate to the community that there simply is no other way and that we tried, and failed, to do everything ad-free.
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.
Exactly my position as well.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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