But I think there is something that is a lot more exciting than ads, namely “Crowd Funding” (like SellaBand.com for example), read my comment on Jimmy Wales’ Blog here. I later found out that Larry Sanger had already written a good article on this subject The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content. (Maybe you could do another special with Larry Sanger on this subject).

But to come back to the subject of ads, I thought that maybe advertisement revenue could be used to jumpstart a crowd funding initiative. Once it gets going and more people see how it works and join in then I think there won’t be a need for ads anymore. Wikipedia could be funded by taking a small part from the “crowd fund”, the rest would be used to free up content, like eBooks, music, software, etc. However this might be better suited for Citizendium instead of Wikipedia, because buying content from the ‘elite’ might be seen as a bad thing by some Wikipedians? Maybe it is good to discuss the issue of crowd funding first, because there might be other options to jumpstart this.