No subject

lesser of the evils - it means we can say with reasonable confidence
that 99.9% of the encyclopedia is completely untouched by any possible
COI, and we can even - perhaps - think about proactive measures like a
discreet disclaimer on articles related to our donor. Unpleasant but
manageable.

For a model with only a small number of advertisers, you're looking at
much the same thing - there is a major worry about COI for each, *but*
the limited number means that we can get a reasonable idea of "these
articles are to worry about, the rest are completely irrelevant to the
adverts and so fine".

The latter case, I presume you're thinking of an adsense model. This
makes it even worse than simply "having a hundred advertisers",
because it gets more and more diffuse. As a result, at any given time
we can't easily say which pages are and aren't "tainted" - *or* how
much money we get from any given advertiser. In effect, we have to
worry about the appearance of potential COI on a large fraction of our
pages, albeit not at a very great level.

The advertising world probably has some complex reputation metric for this...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk