Comments on: Advertising and Wikipedia

By: lexipixel

lexipixel — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:20:13 +0000

“I know a fork of wikipedia with ads on it is possible, but it wouldn’t get to scale–Google loves the Wikipedia domain and wouldn’t be so nice to a second one.”
-Jason

Microsoft, via their $100M Powerset acquisition has duplicated Wikipedia’s content and also tied it into Bing as it’s “reference section”, ( see: http://www.powerset.com -or- http://www.bing.com/reference ).

No ads there yet, but there is an “Advertise” link at the bottom of the page.

If this is fair use, and Google were to do the same thing, (clone Wikipedia content, reformat so almost all links were pointed back into Google), and produced these pages as results instead of the usual #1 ranked Wikipedia results: How much traffic (and revenue, and significance) would Wikipedia lose?

By: EJ Park

EJ Park — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:23:58 +0000

There is a way to do both – have Wikipedia remain ad free and also generate billions of dollars for charitable purposes.

By: JP

JP — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:53:23 +0000

A man with a resilient principle. I admire you, Jimmy.

By: Colin Jensen

Colin Jensen — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:50:20 +0000

I am someone who would turn on ads if offered, and one who is slightly skeptical that there are more effective ways of making money for the wikipedia. Yes, you can dilute your name by licensing it to documentaries or whatever, but isn’t that the same thing? Doesn’t that pollute your name’s integrity far more than an ad, which few people in 2009 will see as a implicit approval / conflict of interest? Anyway, I’m not saying there should be ads, just that I’m not sure there is another option.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:56:38 +0000

Could the reason be argued that Wikipedia has done so well not only because of its structured content but because of its strictness against ads.

I agree with Jimmy on this one, in that it should be the community who decides to do so or not.

Maybe it would be best to make Wikipedia by default have no ads and have an option to have ads IF the user selects so. Would that meet Jimmy’s border on ads?

If this way does not generate enough money to fund charity then the answer is no to ads for now.

I encourage wikipedia not to force ads on their users. I am passionate in this comment.

By: aicra

aicra — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:08:51 +0000

Thank you. I remember a time before advertising online. Your site is clean. I appreciate that.

Keep up the good work.

By: Vinod Kumar

Vinod Kumar — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:08:36 +0000

From reading of your thoughts on advetising , I think your thinking is right because advertising is not everything . Wikipedia is famous website and a large number of contributer supports it . Donation should be the best resource of your earning and your hardwork in wikipedia

By: Niraj

Niraj — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:13:53 +0000

hello,

while advertising in wikipedia is “not in the spirit” of wikipedia, we can think of some other solutions. just like wikipedia is a community created and community used platform, we can create a financing platform which wud be done by community. may be some kind of community led microfinance, which wud be useful for wikipedia as well as other uses too. IT/internet is the only way such a venture wud see the light of day just as wikipedia is possible only with IT/internet.

Niraj

By: WikiBlog

WikiBlog — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:08:41 +0000

Unfortunately, all us remember Enciclopedia Libre incident. Interesting post Jimmy. Greetings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre#Reasons_for_the_split

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:58:56 +0000

Given the feedback I just came up with a more modest, third version of my proposal… interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

http://www.calacanis.com/2006/10/31/wikipeda-advertising-proposal-version-three-the-6m-a-year-sear/