[WikiEN-l] Ads on Wikipedia?

Sat Dec 31 22:48:21 UTC 2005

> > Perhaps the best solution would be like the one Salon,
> > Weather Underground, and many other sites use: pay a
> > subscription fee (say, $29.95 a year) or see (and probably
> > ignore) the ads. That way we'd have our choice of how to
> > personally support Wikipedia.
> >
> > jpgordon

> I agree with the idea of the subscription fee if you can't stand even
> discreet Google Adsense type ads.  But instead of $30 a year, why not
> $5?

All the reasonable advertising proposals I've seen have suggested
$0/year.  IOW, if you want to turn off the ads, you click a button
which says "turn off the ads".  If you're logged in, this turns off
whenever you're logged in.  Either way, a cookie is set to turn off
the ads as long as you still have the cookie set.

> And any relatively active user is probably going to generate $5
> worth of Adsense ads anyway, isn't he?

The standard adsense program only generates revenue when an ad is
clicked, so there would be lots of active users that would generate
$0.

> I don't know what percentage of
> users donate currently, but it's probably very low.  Even assuming that
> all these people drastically reduce their contributions in reaction to
> the introduction of ads, you'd probably be a long way ahead.
>
> Steve

Almost all users donate/contribute, they just don't do so monetarily.

I think the only proposal right now which has any chance of reaching
something nearing a consensus is to put ads on a separate site, such
as nupedia.org.  The WMF could create a wholly owned for-profit
subsidiary corporation, give it the nupedia domain name, and give it a
live feed to the database.  This plan wouldn't make nearly as much
money as putting the ads on wikipedia.org though, at least not at
first.

Anthony