I couldn't quite figure out how these two websites make money. They're a couple of the top websites on the internet and don't have a single ad on them. Isn't that the same as saying "I'm not interested in a 100 million dollars of advertising revenue"?
Well, actually i also don't know how they are making money. But the fact of the matter is, there is one way that i know which is making generous amount to wikipedia and that is Donations. Till now, 25,429 have donated to wikipedia. So i guess this would make them a lot of money for their awesome work.
Craigslist makes their money, it is estimated at 150 million by charging for ads in certain large cities, with a skeletal staff. Wikipedia relies exclusively on donations. These sites could make a whole lot more by putting on adsense ads and charging more. These sites gets millions of page views daily. They're both huge. You can do a simple google search and frequently you'll come across a wikipedia link in the search results as well as craigslist.
That's a shame. Why doesn't wikipedia throw a bit of adsense on their site? even a tiny block somewhere. Or a tribal fusion banner even! They would make $50,000 a day!
I believe that wikipedia follow a different philosophy. It's a bigger programm that would build the bigger source of knoweldge
But then who'd get it? Everybody'd demand a source of that revenue. If you wrote an article, would you feel bad that somebody's making money off of it? What about Mods? It's completely unworkable. Wikipedia relies on the philosophy behind it, being a NPO. Sure, Jimbo Wales has made cash out of it, but he's not in it for the money. He's in it to make a name for himself. Look at people like Einstein, Van Gogh, Shakespeare, Newton and the like. Whilst all of them had relatively comfortable living, none of them were particularly wealthy. All of them however wanted to make a name for themself in their chosen field. Often that drives people more than money.
I agree that craigslist would make a killing with Adsense. All that traffic and no ads on a single page
Craiglist charges when appropriate. If they became ad laden they wouldn't be popular anymore as people shy away from ad-soaked websites.
I don't think they should saturate their website with ads. Just one or two ads on a page wouldn't hurt.
Also, I never noticed the donation link on Wikipedia. You have to remember that some of these peope probably donated a couple of dollars. I can bet that they probably received about a million dollars in donations which isn't squat for a website of their magnitude.
i agree.. craigslist cud make humungous amounts of money.. even if they chuck in a few ads on their popular pages.. but i guess they r non commercial!
I agree with this. Once CraigsList would start posting google ads on it, it would be start to become "the machine", and it would no longer be CraigsList.
see ...wikipedia is social website ... this site got funs from doners ...nothing else ...soon they will be add some sponsers ...i think and will get money