Hi All, was reading this and it made me curious: http://webkew.blogspot.com/2005/04/lesson-3-how-much-money-can-you-make.html Why doesn't Wikipedia place ads on their pages? Instead of struggling with donations? LL&P
Beside Nintendo's point, I think it's cause they want to give the feeling that they are non-bias in their reference and can't be moved by money? Maybe.
there are a lot of reasons. first: if they start publishing ads, they will be bound with advertisers terms. second: people contribute to wikipedia for free. if wikipedia goes publishing ads, they won't be seeing wikipedia as a non-profit organization anymore. so, there will be a huge decrease in content. those are the first things come to my mind.
That's about it. Wikipedia was built on the hippie principle of "power to the masses", with no corporate ties to beholden to.
Thank goodness they're not part of the game! Wish I had all those millions of big, beautiful, content-rich pages, with tons of visitors every day, just begging to be monetized... (sigh)
Non-profit simply means that the company makes no profit after expenditures. They could use the Adsense money to pay the Wiki employees and editors, and still be considered non-profit if they spent all of the Adsense "profit".
you can be a non-profit and still make money. you just have stricter rules on how the money can be spent than most other corporate organizations. it's mostly an image issue. if it ever comes down to wikipedia shutting down because of lack of donations, I sure hope they get their head together and slap ads up.
they would probaly make 25-50million a year if they put ads up. I don't think theyll put up any ads though.
it wouldnt be the same wikipedia with ads , its thought of a big encyclopedia, they don't monetize generally.
If wikipedia put ads their SERPS would eventualy fall because people would stop linking to wikipedia. It would become another answers.com which ranks much lower than wikipedia and has lots of ads.
the main reason wikipedia is linked more often than answers.com is that answers.com's data comes from wikipedia it's just a mirror. they add some useful content, but it's still using wikipedia data.
Sorry didn't post this before - Found it just after - anyway there is a discussion about it here in this blog: http://www.calacanis.com/2006/10/30/wikipedia-advertising-proposal-part-ii-and-i-shouldnt-have-us/ hope this provides more reasons to the issue!