[WikiEN-l] Real-time mirrors as a net revenue _source_?

[Tim Starling]

Neil Harris wrote:
> What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per 
> hit for an official real-time mirror service? 

We already have something very similar, in the form of a paid OAI-PMH subscription. It's kept very
quiet, maybe for PR reasons, so there aren't many subscribers.

> As a result:
> * Wikipedia remains ad-free

That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one
of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search
engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those
search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.

> * the WF gets revenue
> * the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time 
> without leeching unauthorized resources.
> 
> The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null 
> skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly 
> reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater 
> possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content 
> easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from 
> around the page contents.

The best cache hit rate is for ordinary anonymous page views. Unless hits from mirrors were
responsible for a significant proportion of our traffic, the reduced cache hit ratio would outweigh
any benefit from lightweight skins.

-- Tim Starling