I personally would love to see Wikipedia sell ads. Nothing crazy, just one subtle and tasteful text ad per page, sold by auction. (The ads would be much smaller and more relevant than "a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales".)
The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR.
Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.
As someone who very much values the clarity of content without the insidious distraction of advertisements, I would not like to see Wikipedia sell ads.
I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly.
Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things:
- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
I disagree. Ads can be detrimental, sure, but they're also in many ways complementary to digital, frictionless distribution.
For example, ads encourage sharing. With a paid product, you have to gate access. But then there's a sort of implicit conflict between wanting as many consumers as possible, but wanting to get paid. And especially because it's hard to know the quality of digital media without consuming it, it's hard to know whether it's worth paying for. So there's a ton of friction. That barrier to entry stops virality cold, which limits distribution, and also revenue.
There are ways to do ads well. Google is the obvious example. Highly relevant, not particularly distracting, and take advantage of the intentionality of the searcher.
I think ads are a naturally better revenue stream for digital content. Not to say that they can't or won't be abused.
> - A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
As someone who works for a different video streaming site (that also has legal content licenses), your ire may be misplaced. Rather than a lack of respect for the customer there's a very likely possibility that the ads must be shown, even for subscribers, due to licensing agreements.
Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things:
- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
I think it's more indicative of a website trying to pay its bills.
A lot of assholes ruin their content with ads, for sure. A simple text ad or one, small ad, like a Deck Network ad for example, would hardly be so damaging.
Having Wikipedia sell ads would lead to insidious conflicts of interest. How do you know that they're not censoring edits to make articles reflect more positively on a company with which they have a commercial relationship?
It is possible to remove edits in a way that makes the diffs inaccessible. Currently, such power is used in a tiny minority of cases (e.g. personally identifying information). If Wikipedia entered into commercial partnerships with advertisers there would be great pressure to use those tools in a non-neutral fashion.
It seems unlikely that the type of people who shepherd Wikipedia pages in their free time would fail to notice and immediately report that type of censorship. The proof would be unnecessary - even the implication that Wikipedia was tampering with the content of its pages would have a huge effect on its reputation.
I dunno, I can imagine how accepting donations could make that an even bigger problem.
Selling ads, they'd get a little money from a lot of people. Angering a company that's paying $50 a month isn't a big deal because it's just $50 and if they pull out Wikipedia can sell the ad to somebody else.
On the other hand, in this case they're getting a lot of money from a single person. They might think twice before posting negative information about somebody who just donated $500k.
I agree the temptation is there, a number of people have accused Google of falling into this trap (sellind ads on search results gives them incentive to manipulate their search results).
That being said, a subscription service would be good, and some folks would cry out voiciferously that they can go read the encyclopedia in the library for 'free' why not on the web.
Culturally I think the world is coming to grips with the notion that information has intrinsic value, and that compensating that value achieves the goal of creating additional supplies of information. Interesting process to watch.
The main barrier for this are Wikipedia’s authors and editors. Many would feel that Wikimedia is trying to make money off their work – no matter whether that’s a justified view or not. Wikipedia risks alienating large numbers of their authors and editors if they introduce ads.
The Wikipedia authors and editors I have heard speak about this topic seem to be strongly opposed to any kind of commercialization and ads. Writing for Wikipedia is not always fun and sometimes tedious and annoying work. I don’t think Wikipedia can afford to ignore their authors and editors or risk losing them. It’s not like they have to do any work for Wikipedia and it seems like many are doing it for idealistic reasons.
For that reason alone I don’t think it’s very likely that there will ever be ads on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia would have to try very hard to win over as many authors and editors as possible beforehand and would probably also have to give them a lot of say in how ads are implemented and how Wikimedia is run (I think many would demand absolute transparency from Wikimedia and that they justify any and all spending in detail).
Another way to bring ads to Wikipedia might be some sort of grass roots movement from the community. I, however, don’t see anyone who would be willing to start such a movement and I also don’t see how such a movement could win over large numbers.
Wikipedia’s relatively federal structure would certainly allow for interesting experiments. It would be nice to test ads in some smaller Wiki, maybe the Russian or Spanish Wikipedia. That would be a lot more responsible than just introducing ads everywhere. But political pressures inside Wikipedia would require a political genius when it comes to actually implementing that.
Ads would be a shame I think, but maybe they could have a sponsor. Just in the bottom right corner of the Wikipedia icon, it would say 'sponsored by ____'.
I mean that's not too obtrusive but would surely bring in a lot of money. Football teams get £20m a season to put a name on their shirt so...
Better yet, at least in the US there's a long history of non-commercial media like PBS (public television) and National Public Radio mentioning sponsors in exactly this sort of way, and no one objects, so the resistance should be pretty low.
Although it's probably correct that ads wouldn't impact the content/bias of Wikipedia articles, I think a portion (at least) of the success is that it's clear that there isn't any such interference by corporations on the editorial content of the site. The moment you bring ads into the picture at least a portion of the internet will start to wonder about that. There are a lot of cynical (or realistic - depending on your point of view :) people out there who have seen people/sites/whatever chasing money change the direction and feel of a website.
I'd much rather deal with Jimmy Wales' pleas every so often than to wonder if maybe [insert sponsoring entity here] had some role of changing the tone/content/whatever of a given article.
It has already been said why some people, including me, think that ads on Wikipedia would be a (very) bad things so I want tell why again. But something which is obvious to me hasn't been said: I think that Wikipedia should be part of the UNESCO's World Heritage and as such be financed with public fund by the United Nations. Given what Wikipedia is, I really wouldn't mind (actually I would be very happy) if governments had to give the project enough money to do whatever the Wikimedia Foundation needs to do. I would prefer our taxes money helping Wikipedia rather than helping banks and other thiefs.
Wikipedia is not a profit making organization and their commitment to keep the content free and accessible is admirable. Once I start earning I will donate lot more to them. I will be happy to see them not having advertisements.
Agree. Even pbs.org (broadcast) which works with donations from individuals and foundations typically does a pre-roll before any show touting the donors. And I've seen things that border on mini ads on certain shows as well for certain donors. They are not just a logo but convey a message with some video. (Sorry I don't couldn't find links to examples).
Additionally, they sell items off their website which have nothing to do with repackaging their content:
Here's a page with an ad for "argosy university" which says "support provided by". The logos for the major funders appear in the bottom right of the same page (this is what is typically done in a pre-roll). I'm pretty sure the reason that Argosy does this is for ad value.
PBS is a bad example since they're now selling advertising in everything but name. Their "sponsor messages" mention a specific product and a slogan, and they also sell messages targeted to specific shows (such as you'll find news/documentaries on high speed rail sponsored by Siemens). PBS have even started producing 30 second ads they run[1]
I completely agree. I've long thought that Wikipedia should sell ads or have commercial partnerships.
Another idea is partnering with a search engine. Add "Search for X on Google/Bing" to their search drop-downs and add a tasteful "Search in Google/Bing" on each article plus the search landing page. This wouldn't be very intrusive, many users would find it useful, and it's hugely valuable for the search engines.
It seems like such a missed opportunity. The additional money raised could be used in so many ways: investing in full-time researchers and fact-checkers, having full-time photographers, creating teaching materials, or freeing up copyrighted content. Content, afterall, is their core competency.
Wikimedia could be the Google of content if only it had the leadership and ambition.
I think there would be a fairly strong uproar if they started making money off people's donated time and energy. The dynamic would change considerably.
One aspect of ads you're ignoring is how they spread the cost of using a product: whereas charging a fee impacts all users equally, ads will generally impact users relative to their income / spending habits. It strikes me that for Wikipedia, that is more compatible with their objectives than a set per-user fee.
I'm haven't thought of many reasons to like ads over they years, but this is one.
This makes total sense. After all the personal appeal is an ad. Much better to have non-intrusive ads that people might even find useful in some cases.
>It was an excellent year for the Wikimedia Foundation from a financial perspective.
The 2010-11 plan called for us to increase revenue 28% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million,
and to increase spending 124% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million. In fact, we significantly
over-achieved from a revenue perspective, and we also under spent, resulting in a
larger reserve than planned. We closed the year with a reserve of $12 million, up from
$7 million the prior year.
This over-achievement is primarily due to the success of the 2010 WMF fundraiser. In
2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation refocused from a mixed revenue model to a strong
primary focus on the annual campaign: this resulted in our shortest and most
successful campaign to date, raising $15 million (up 72% from 2009's $8.7 million) in
50 days (25% fewer than 2009's 67 days). If you include the $6.5 million received by
12 chapters which acted as payment processors in 2010, the total raised by the
movement in the 2010 campaign was $21.5 million.[1]
No. Beyond technical stuff and Apple, Wozniak is a simple man with a good heart but still a rather simple man who apparently doesn't appreciate money all that much. Beyond math, science and Google, Brin is an idealist with grand ideas about the world. Expect much more from him in the future since he does indeed have a lot of money, understands money's potential very well and is careful about investing in anything now knowing that later he'll be even more mature and will make much wiser investments.
In this case Brin might just be a convenient way to subsidize Wikipedia. Google depends on Wikipedia to provide good results for a large percentage of their searches.
As one of the unfortunate who has had to attempt to hack at mediawiki... I hope some of that cash goes towards improving their code base. It's gotta be costing them in maintenance (to say nothing of the ability to add new features).
Mediawiki is indeed a very poor substitute for a VCS, and things could probably be improved. For example, there once was a project to store Wikipedia articles using git as a backend: <https://github.com/scy/levitation>.
A decent portion of the latest budget is going into hiring technical staff; and from what I have observed of that "department" things are improving rapidly :)
What made her freak out? Just the existence of the banner, or that she didn't realize Wikipedia needs funding from the public? How did she respond afterwards?
It is a very popular license. Content on Wikipedia used to be GFDL-only, but the CC is obviously better suited. I doubt this connection has anything to do with the donation.
They do have a partnership with a print-on-demand company that donates 10% of the revenues, but it just concatenates articles you choose into a book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PediaPress
There is also a user-driven project to organize Wikipedia articles into books, although they currently just use the articles verbatim as chapters, which doesn't address things like redundancy between articles that makes sense when they're articles, but should ideally be removed if they were going to be printed as book chapters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...
I think it's a great idea. PediaPress is great but (like Wikipedia itself) a little utilitarian.
I have thought it would be a great revenue source for the WMF. Make little books based on certain articles like the List of Common Misconceptions. Sell them as impulse purchases near checkout counters in bookstores. Step 3, profit.
The fundraising team at the WMF isn't really into it, they don't want the hassle of making & distributing physical objects that may not even sell. But it would be a cool project for the right team -- maybe if you want to build your resume as a book designer.
Yeh, something similar except beautiful, not just printing the content. Beautiful cover, font, design, maybe even vintage looking. It might not be "scalable" tho but I think people would dig it and willing to pay $100 for something like that. I would buy a vintage looking book about cars.
Unlike NPR (et al), Wikipedia could actually ask for donations and then not show the appeals for donations to people who have donated (e.g. by providing simple logins). Similarly, Wikipedia could show ads or not depending on whether someone paid a small fee. I wouldn't mind either.
Readit News
The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR.
Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.
I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly.
Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things:
- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
For example, ads encourage sharing. With a paid product, you have to gate access. But then there's a sort of implicit conflict between wanting as many consumers as possible, but wanting to get paid. And especially because it's hard to know the quality of digital media without consuming it, it's hard to know whether it's worth paying for. So there's a ton of friction. That barrier to entry stops virality cold, which limits distribution, and also revenue.
There are ways to do ads well. Google is the obvious example. Highly relevant, not particularly distracting, and take advantage of the intentionality of the searcher.
I think ads are a naturally better revenue stream for digital content. Not to say that they can't or won't be abused.
As someone who works for a different video streaming site (that also has legal content licenses), your ire may be misplaced. Rather than a lack of respect for the customer there's a very likely possibility that the ads must be shown, even for subscribers, due to licensing agreements.
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- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume
OR
- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
I think it's more indicative of a website trying to pay its bills.
A lot of assholes ruin their content with ads, for sure. A simple text ad or one, small ad, like a Deck Network ad for example, would hardly be so damaging.
It is possible to remove edits in a way that makes the diffs inaccessible. Currently, such power is used in a tiny minority of cases (e.g. personally identifying information). If Wikipedia entered into commercial partnerships with advertisers there would be great pressure to use those tools in a non-neutral fashion.
Selling ads, they'd get a little money from a lot of people. Angering a company that's paying $50 a month isn't a big deal because it's just $50 and if they pull out Wikipedia can sell the ad to somebody else.
On the other hand, in this case they're getting a lot of money from a single person. They might think twice before posting negative information about somebody who just donated $500k.
That being said, a subscription service would be good, and some folks would cry out voiciferously that they can go read the encyclopedia in the library for 'free' why not on the web.
Culturally I think the world is coming to grips with the notion that information has intrinsic value, and that compensating that value achieves the goal of creating additional supplies of information. Interesting process to watch.
Perhaps the problem with formulating such agreements is that there is no precedent.
The Wikipedia authors and editors I have heard speak about this topic seem to be strongly opposed to any kind of commercialization and ads. Writing for Wikipedia is not always fun and sometimes tedious and annoying work. I don’t think Wikipedia can afford to ignore their authors and editors or risk losing them. It’s not like they have to do any work for Wikipedia and it seems like many are doing it for idealistic reasons.
For that reason alone I don’t think it’s very likely that there will ever be ads on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia would have to try very hard to win over as many authors and editors as possible beforehand and would probably also have to give them a lot of say in how ads are implemented and how Wikimedia is run (I think many would demand absolute transparency from Wikimedia and that they justify any and all spending in detail).
Another way to bring ads to Wikipedia might be some sort of grass roots movement from the community. I, however, don’t see anyone who would be willing to start such a movement and I also don’t see how such a movement could win over large numbers.
Wikipedia’s relatively federal structure would certainly allow for interesting experiments. It would be nice to test ads in some smaller Wiki, maybe the Russian or Spanish Wikipedia. That would be a lot more responsible than just introducing ads everywhere. But political pressures inside Wikipedia would require a political genius when it comes to actually implementing that.
I mean that's not too obtrusive but would surely bring in a lot of money. Football teams get £20m a season to put a name on their shirt so...
I'd much rather deal with Jimmy Wales' pleas every so often than to wonder if maybe [insert sponsoring entity here] had some role of changing the tone/content/whatever of a given article.
Additionally, they sell items off their website which have nothing to do with repackaging their content:
http://pbskidstoys.shop.pbskids.org/
http://pbskidstoys.shop.pbskids.org/school-supplies/back-to-....
Here's a page with an ad for "argosy university" which says "support provided by". The logos for the major funders appear in the bottom right of the same page (this is what is typically done in a pre-roll). I'm pretty sure the reason that Argosy does this is for ad value.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
While certainly appearing more tasteful than typical ads there is still ad value that these companies receive for their donations and support.
1 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/161440/pbs-pro...
Another idea is partnering with a search engine. Add "Search for X on Google/Bing" to their search drop-downs and add a tasteful "Search in Google/Bing" on each article plus the search landing page. This wouldn't be very intrusive, many users would find it useful, and it's hugely valuable for the search engines.
It seems like such a missed opportunity. The additional money raised could be used in so many ways: investing in full-time researchers and fact-checkers, having full-time photographers, creating teaching materials, or freeing up copyrighted content. Content, afterall, is their core competency.
Wikimedia could be the Google of content if only it had the leadership and ambition.
I'm haven't thought of many reasons to like ads over they years, but this is one.
Deleted Comment
Way better than that huge begging sign on every page.
>It was an excellent year for the Wikimedia Foundation from a financial perspective. The 2010-11 plan called for us to increase revenue 28% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million, and to increase spending 124% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million. In fact, we significantly over-achieved from a revenue perspective, and we also under spent, resulting in a larger reserve than planned. We closed the year with a reserve of $12 million, up from $7 million the prior year. This over-achievement is primarily due to the success of the 2010 WMF fundraiser. In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation refocused from a mixed revenue model to a strong primary focus on the annual campaign: this resulted in our shortest and most successful campaign to date, raising $15 million (up 72% from 2009's $8.7 million) in 50 days (25% fewer than 2009's 67 days). If you include the $6.5 million received by 12 chapters which acted as payment processors in 2010, the total raised by the movement in the 2010 campaign was $21.5 million.[1]
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_...
Just joking, that's a nice donation. My wife was totally freaked out this week though...she had never seen the donation banner before.
1. She had no clue who this guy was suddenly staring at her 2. Didn't know Wikipedia needs $
This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses.
------------------------------
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki
Maybe that will be my weekend project!
There is also a user-driven project to organize Wikipedia articles into books, although they currently just use the articles verbatim as chapters, which doesn't address things like redundancy between articles that makes sense when they're articles, but should ideally be removed if they were going to be printed as book chapters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...
Here's an example one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Compiler_construction
I have thought it would be a great revenue source for the WMF. Make little books based on certain articles like the List of Common Misconceptions. Sell them as impulse purchases near checkout counters in bookstores. Step 3, profit.
The fundraising team at the WMF isn't really into it, they don't want the hassle of making & distributing physical objects that may not even sell. But it would be a cool project for the right team -- maybe if you want to build your resume as a book designer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
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