Wikipedia Weekly 4 - Advertising on Wikipedia?
The Panel
Special Segment
Jason Calacanis joins us this episode, to discuss his recent proposal for advertising to be placed on Wikipedia.
News
- A high school student is arrested after posting a bomb threat on Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia’s appearances on several major search engines are examined.
- The Hutter Prize for the lossless compression of a 100MB excerpt from Wikipedia is awarded for the first time.
- The United States intelligence community launches “Intellipedia“.
- A story from major news outlet Reuters appears to have been plagiarized from Wikipedia.
Feedback
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- email feedback (at) wikipediaweekly (dot) com
- blog comments
- On-Wiki @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WWPC#Feedback
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Interesting discussion on Google ad-sense - you’ve convinced me.
I always assumed that ads on WP would mean a flashing coloured banner on the front page that say “WINNER” or some other agressive advertising. Your opt-out search page thing is really good. And, as you say, it would increase our independence rather than decrease it.
Keep up the good work guys - and promote the podcast more, no one knows about it!
Comment by witty lama — November 6, 2006 @ 8:06 pm
i agree, you need to get yourselves out there
Comment by j — November 6, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
I think it would be interesting to do some experimenting with ads. It could start out with an experiment that makes no changes to the website. I like the idea of using a Greasemonkey script, which allows you to customize the way a webpage displays, to display ads on the site. The Wikimedia Foundation only has to get a Google AdSense account and make their Client ID public. Multiple versions of these scripts that display ads in different ways could be made available. Users could decide for themselves if they are willing to look at ads to support Wikipedia, and how many ads the are willing to display. So at first users of Wikipedia would not get to see the ads, nor see the option to opt-in. People would need to find out about this in some other way and if they want to see the ads they would need to actively pursue this option, which also guarantees that they know what the ad revenue is being used for. This is not a good way to provide this feature to all that would like to support Wikipedia this way, but this way a small group of early adopters can experiment with the ads. That way it is possible to learn from this experience with limited risk. If there are problems or negative effects, modifications can be made, and if that fails as well it would be very easy to stop it. If it is a success then you could take the next step and introduce the option to opt-in to support Wikipedia by displaying ads.
I think you should be careful when you use an opt-out option, you need to get it right the first time, otherwise once you have it worked out the problems, many users might have already opted-out and will not opt-in again. With Google AdSense I think it is possible to stop showing ads immediately, you’re not stuck to a long term contract, so if there would be a negative reaction it can be stopped immediately, which I think would make this a low risk experiment.
It would be interesting to find out what the users think of this. What they think of others voluntarily watching ads to support Wikipedia, if they would do so, which options they prefer, etc. Also ask what the major benefactors think of this, whether it would be a reason to stop/reduce their support.
I think it would be good to contact Google to see what the possibilities, requirements and best practices are. There is no harm in taking a look at the possibilities.
This discussion is scattered over a number of sites and blog entries. Is there already a central place to discuss this (and get organised)?
The benefits can be substantial and the risks can be reduced, that makes this well worth the effort of discussing and experimenting with. I think it is a great opportunity that deserves more attention. At the moment the community does not have the option to implement it, whether they want to or not. I think it should be given a chance, if it doesn’t work the decision can be reversed easily, but if it does work it can give a great opportunity to further the goals of the foundation and the community. Why not give it a try?
Comment by Isaac — November 6, 2006 @ 10:37 pm