I had an interesting discussion this evening with a senior sales executive for a major commercial publisher, who was totally amazed that we did not accept advertisements, as in his view everyone wanted to maximize income and financial support and the money the staff could be paid--as his company did.
that of course is why he is there, and i am here.
consider the
On 10/24/07, Jason Calacanis jason@calacanis.com wrote:
On 10/24/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Mmm. Which side do we sell advertising to on [[Abortion]]? If you don't blacklist you'll get screams; if you do you'll get screams, whoever you pick on.
Actually, you can easily turn off ads on a per page basis. At Mahalo we turn off ads on controversial pages on a regular basis (think: school shootings). Also, Google turns them off as well as best they can.
So, really a non issue.
In an attempt to maintain (appearances of) neutrality, we'd have to spend quite a lot of effort controlling who gets these advertising slots on contested topics; that's going to eat into the profits quite quickly. It's not a simple matter of "and now, open the money pipe"
Actually, it just might be that easy. What if we opened it up in stages and get feedback along the way:
Step one: 100% optin advertising where the user has to turn it on. Step two: put ads on search results, or give folks the option to "Use Google to search wikipedia" with the ads going to Wikipedia--so again, opt in. Step three: if steps one and two do well, PERHAPS put ads on pages by default. In fact, Wikipedia could run ads up until the point it raised $50M and then turn them off and live off the 3-5M that would turn over in interest!
Step one is a total no brainer... i can't think of one reason to be against OPTin advertising.... can anyone?
best j
Jason McCabe Calacanis CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com Mobile: 310-456-4900 My blog: http://www.calacanis.com
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