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