[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia struggles, Mozilla set for life?

[Andrew Gray]

On 25/10/2007, Jason Calacanis <jason at calacanis.com> wrote:

> 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?

Here's the simplest possible objection I can think of: as yet, we
don't need to. We *can* survive successfully without it. Not as well
as we'd like, but we can. Taking advertising - on whatever level - is
icing on the cake, financially speaking, for the immediate future.

So taking advertising gives us a bonus, but not an essential one. Are
there detriments to advertising, to counteract this bonus? Yes.

I personally can live with advertising. I have nothing in particular
against it beyond a vague distaste for the industry.

But it's a stark fact that our community, as a whole, are really,
really, really, really touchy about anything that even *looks* faintly
like advertising. Partly this is a deep worry over exactly where the
money goes, I suspect; the Foundation is a confusing and shadowy body
a lot of the time, and we regularly get people asking when we plan to
go public or how many of our admins are paid, and so on. We spend a
lot of time during the fundraisers -and out of them! - dealing with
just these queries...

And this sort of unease won't go away with it being opt-in
advertising; there will be a strong feeling that Someone, Somewhere Is
Making Money Off This. This is not a good thing for our general level
of support, especially given the trouble the Foundation has making
itself look transparent and efficient. (The corollary to that is And
It Isn't Me, which has interesting implications for our contributors'
enthusiasm! People are much less willing to give work for free if they
think someone else is getting paid for doing exactly the same
thing...)

This is the problem. There *will* be negative effects from opening up
the money tap, however discreetly you do it - and once we've done it,
it's very hard to go back. I am very uncomfortable with the idea of
waving hypothetically large sums of money around and saying "lets do
it!", whoever it is doing the waving.

If we were up against the wall, sure, advertising would be a much more
immediate option - the detrimental effects would be secondary to
survival. But - to use what seems an appropriate analogy - we're not
starving in the mountains yet, and it's a bit soon to be thinking
which of our fellow travellers would make the best stew.

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