With the risk of sounding like a broken record...
:-) Mozilla announced
(confirmed) they are making over $50M a year from their search box while
Wikipedia struggles over fund raising on a regular basis.
Some thoughts:
1. Wikipedia would make $100M+ if they put on Google Adsense on every
page--easily.
2. Wikipedia could let users choose to turn ads on or off.
3. Wikipedia would make at least 20M if Wikipedia used Google Adsense for
just search (which, ironically is what many wikipedia folks do anyway...
search google for
site:wikipedia.com).
4. If Wikipedia folks were concerned about being beholden to just Google we
could setup a system to rotate ads from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. randomly
(text ads of course).
5. If folks are concerned about the content of ads it is easy enough to
block certain advertisers.
More here:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2007/10/beyond_sustainabil…
Anyway, if folks from the foundation ever want help on these things I'm
available to consult for free and have setup deals like these (i.e. between
Netscape/AOL/Weblogs, Inc. and Google)
Thoughts?
Best j
Personally, I really dislike the idea of any advertising on Wikimedia.
This makes a fool of [[WP:NPOV]], [[WP:COI]] and related policies and
guidelines. It should only be considered if things get extremely
desperate. The advert-free site is refreshing and welcoming and that is
something we should strive to keep, pretty much at all costs.
GDonato