[WikiEN-l] Re: Ads on Wikipedia?

[Peter Mackay]

> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org 
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
> 
> charles matthews wrote:

> > (i) If the market is really saying that there is a huge revenue 
> > available since people 'in general' don't mind ads (the good French 
> > verb is 'mithridatiser', I recall), why is no corporation not 
> > sincerely chasing this money with a high-quality WP clone?
> 
> Since there are already mirrors with ads, yes, there are 
> people chasing that money now. A high-quality clone that 
> could compete with WP's name recognition would require 
> significant investment up front, and take several years to 
> establish itself in the public's mind;

Your idealism and loyalty is laudable, but remember that in terms of
quality, a teenager with a bit of Linux knowledge can download the whole lot
for free and get it operational in an afternoon.*

And I rather suspect that our "name recognition" is due more to being up
near the top of Google search results than any other single factor. If
Google developed their own product, I can confidently predict that it would
be way cooler than WP, and that they would bump their own results above WP's
in Google searches.

Peter (Skyring)

*dealing with success and bandwidth might be a problem, however