On 10/25/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
My key point was that I'd personally prefer opt-out targeted advertising for two weeks out of the year to what Wikipedia has right now.
I doubt it would make as much money, though, so it's irrelevant. Advertising can make a lot of money, but if it's opt-out and only lasts two weeks, I can't see it rivalling a fundraiser. The results of our fundraisers are measured in the millions, could we really get millions from two weeks of ads?
First of all, I don't think opt-out is going to make significantly less than forced-in. Opt-in advertisements would be significantly less effective, but I don't think many people would choose to opt-out and I think the ones that chose to do so would be the least likely to click on the ads anyway. But feel free to double my amount of time if you'd like, I'd still feel the same way. Secondly, the last time I calculated it I estimated that it'd only take 2 weeks of Google Adsense ads to make enough money to fulfill the WMF's budget. If you want to make some updated calculations, feel free.
Oh hell, I'll do it. Let's say $2 CPM (that's low according to http://www.sitepoint.com/article/introducing-google-adsense), on 7 billion page views per month (http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/06/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-traffic). That's $14 million a month, which would mean roughly $7 million from two weeks of ads.
Triple my numbers if you want, and Wikipedia could make $4.6 million in a month. And I'd still personally prefer a month of opt-out targetted text ads to the current fundraising messages.
And that's all I'm talking about in this message. My personal preference - which would be less annoying to me personally.