[WikiEN-l] Re: Ads on Wikipedia?

Mon Jan 2 13:14:43 UTC 2006

On 1/2/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Anthere" wrote
>
> > Might another solution in the future be to really have two websites. One
> > "stable", for readers only (a mirror we would run ourselves) with light
> > advertisement. And the editable one with no ads (and much less traffic) ?
>
> Questions:
>
> (i) If the market is really saying that there is a huge revenue available
> since people 'in general' don't mind ads (the good French verb is
> 'mithridatiser', I recall), why is no corporation not sincerely chasing this
> money with a high-quality WP clone?

Quality is in the eye of the beholder, but Answers Corporation
(http://www.answers.com/) is an $80 million public company.  Of course
if Wikipedia ran its own mirror it would likely be much more popular
than answers.com, because people would know that all the net profits
go back to the WMF (also because of the synergies such as being able
to hook up an ethernet cable directly between the two sites for a live
feed).  The costs would probably be lower, too, because at least some
Wikipedians would likely be willing to work on the mirror site (even
though it has advertisements) and there would be no need to spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on the top executive salaries.

Anthony