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

[Neil Harris]

Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
>
> Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is
> that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for
> the privilege of doing so.
>
> Ryan
>
>   
Well, strictly speaking, they won't _have_ to pay anything, since the 
content itself is free, they could simply download a dump and work from 
that.

It's just that if they want to load Wikipedia's servers by using them in 
real time, and don't want to get cut off without notice, they could pay 
for the privilege of doing so, and thus support Wikipedia by offsetting 
significantly more than the raw cost of serving their hits.

Of course, they can always leech without paying, as is generally the 
case now, but if they can be cut off rapidly before they make any money 
(hint: they only get revenue if they appear on search engines, and as 
soon as that happens, we can also see them and distinguish them from 
non-real-time mirrors) they may well consider paying part of their 
revenue to be the better option.

-- Neil