Posted on 6 Comments

Wikipedia leaves $100M on the table – no advertising

Jason McCabe Calacanis (Weblogs) writes about this… Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) does not want to have *any* advertising, even if all of the proceeds were to go to worthy causes.

Is there anything wrong with that? Jason appears to think so, pleading with Jimmy to reconsider. There’ll even be free bandwidth chucked in. But that’s a catch… Jimmy does not want to be dependent on anyone else for hardware or bandwidth, Wikipedia has had fab offers from a variety of companies with great infrastructure. Other people are commenting to that blog post also, some reckon that Jimmy might change his mind “for the right price”. I’m pondering… is it really so hard to understand -or at least appreciate and respect- that some people have certain guiding principles and actually stick with them – no price? Are we really so cynical now that we reckon that everything and everybody has a price?

And is advertising really completely harmless, could someone have advertising on a site and not have it change the site at all, nor affect the users in any way? I reckon not. By definition, for the advertising to be effective it has to catch the user’s eye – so it distracts from whatever they were doing. That’s the objective, and it’s not in sync with Wikipedia’s goals. Also, what about independence? Wikipedia aims to be neutral, and you can’t really say you’re neutral if at the same time some companies advertise on your site… so the solution is: no advertising.

I think Jimmy’s line is perfectly sensible, given his principles and objectives for Wikipedia. Rock on Jimbo.

Posted on 6 Comments

6 thoughts on “Wikipedia leaves $100M on the table – no advertising

  1. I did a follow up post at http://www.calacanis.com where I took some of the feedback and thought “what if you could opt out of advertising with one click?” of course, you could make it optin as well…. although that would be less effective.

    best jason

  2. Tnx for your response.
    Opt-in being “less effective” is of course from the advertiser’s perspective, which again makes the point I was making… advertising is by definition intrusive, if it doesn’t get the prospect’s attention it is not effective. However, that’s of no concern to either Wikipedia users, or Jimbo.
    IMHO opt-out is a very offensive method, it forces people to undertake action to not be hindered… that’s self-contradictory. And given the amount of stuff that people are bombarded with, the cumulative hindrance is huge. Each advertiser bears part of the responsibility for that, really.
    I don’t want to be forced to make an extra click to not see stuff I didn’t want to see in the first place. And that click, as mentioned, is many times multipled with all sites and emails that use the same mechanism. It’s not trivial at all, it’s a very serious intrusion on my time. Can I bill for that?

  3. Thank you, Jimmy, for holding true to your principles!

    This is not the only principled stand made by Wikipedia. Their commitment to “radical transparency” comes to mind — all their decisions are made in public. This goes right through to the core of MediaWiki, the software they use and share with the world: they refuse to implement features that would compromise transparency, such as read-access controls. And they also vigorously resist those who, quite accurately, point out that if they added this or that, they would serve a much greater market. But they don’t want to serve a greater market — they want to keep from being distracted from making Wikipedia great.

    We need more groups like this!

  4. I wonder how much of the ad revenue Jason thinks the owners should get? You know, the people who wrote wikipedia and own the copyright? 🙂

  5. I have nothing but the highest regard for anyone who places their principles first. Well done Jimmy, I fully agree with both your decision and your reasons.

  6. Me, Too™

Comments are closed.