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

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Tim Starling wrote:
> 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.
> 
> It's the difference between harrassing and encouraging. What we'd be
> selling would be the ability to set up a Wikipedia mirror for $10 per
> month plus a couple of hours of setup time, with the security of
> knowing your service won't be randomly cut off by the Wikimedia
> server admins. Currently you either have to buy more expensive
> hosting with enough disk space to hold a complete copy, or you have
> to evade the blocks and remote load from our servers.
> 
> Of course, if the venture is successful and the site becomes popular,
> then the costs will increase in proportion to the traffic, but so
> will the revenue. That's why the startup costs are the only financial
> risk involved. If you reduce or eliminate them, then you encourage
> the proliferation of mirrors.
> 
> How many mirrors is enough? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? Eventually I
> imagine the market will become saturated, when a new mirror can't
> recover its minimal startup costs, even with the most aggressive SEO
> techniques. What will the Internet look like then? Will the average
> user be able to find independent information in the search engines,
> which didn't come from Wikpedia?
> 

Obligatory [[m:bash]] quote:

<jwales> Damn Wikipedia people!
<jwales> They took over the Internet!

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