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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

4. You could ask for donations to support the site.

If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compliance that they will voluntarily pay even if it is unlikely that the site owner would ever find out about their unauthorized corporate use.

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If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful.

As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.

Yes, and as the fifth most popular site in the world, that is a pittance. They could be making billions with unobtrusive advertising. Given their traffic, the fact that they only raised $25 million last year means that nearly all of their users ignored their pleas for help. Further, when they do their begging, it is very obtrusive and disruptive to the user experience. Where alternative revenue models are available, begging shouldn't even be a consideration.

What revenue models? Advertising could skew/bias Wikipedia

why would advertising skew the factual information presented in wikipedia? Advertising is based off content, content isn't based off advertising.

That's true only if a site strictly uses a contextual advertising system. Most high-traffic sites sell specific ad space and time (AKA an ad campaign) to the highest bidder in order to supplement their normal advertising network.

Even if Wikipedia used the most unobtrusive, low-key advertising system possible, people would still react negatively because Wikipedia is known for having no advertising whatsoever.

Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

>Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

maybe? but compare wikipedia's uptime to, say, twitter or reddit. Advertising dollars do not always make for reasonable Engineering decisions. (I'm not saying that advertising causes twitter or reddit to go down often; but they both get dramatically more revenue per user. I mean, dramatically more revenue per user, and they both have terrible uptime vs. wikipedia.)

I don't know about that, Wikipedia was down for a whole day last year.

One concern I saw mentioned was that after receiving advertising revenue, Wikipedia might become reliant on it, which would allow an advertiser to exert influence over the organization, such as demanding for articles to be removed that are negative to the advertiser's interests, with a threat to pull advertising funding.

But yes, I agree, it seems possible for WP to accept advertisement without compromising on its core values. Decide in advance never to give in to such demands, and do not take the funding for granted.

Deciding not to accept advertising might be short-sighted. With enough years of advertising revenue, Wikipedia might be able to work toward financial independence (where returns on investment exceed costs), and build an endowment like the sort that powers top universities.

They could set up a separate non-profit organisation (that donates its proceeds to the wikimedia foundation) to sell and manage the ads. Place the organisation in a city far from any wikimedia presence to counter casual contact. Put in the charter than there can be zero personnel overlap between the businesses at any level and that nobody at the ads company is allowed to edit any article on wikipedia or any reason, much less hold any admin credentials . Embrace openness: Publish as much as is practical about every deal, and make sure all ads on the sites are directly referenceable back to the deal in which they were purchased. Publish the names and resumes of all account managers.

... if they can get by with donations, that seems a tad simpler.

Also, I don't have to watch any ads! Hurray for Wikipedia!

You seem to have missed the bit where they ran massive, obnoxious ads for months begging users to donate. And all for a pittance in donation revenue.

Yes, but the point is - they don't get much revenue. About 2c per user. Which might be fine for their purposes.

You write with great confidence but... have a look at some detailed and interesting arguments for and against at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements

Perhaps they could, but what could they do with those billions that actually furthers their goals? They're having enough trouble handling the income they already have.

Average cost per user per month in 2012-2013 is roughly $0.007[1]. They also achieved a quite high CTR and donation rate with their banners[2]. Do they really need to trade independency and users trust for (hypothetical) billion-worth ads? One should also keep in mind that non-for-profits must spend all their money in the year.

[1] Jimmy Walles on Quora: http://qr.ae/TL1ku [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...

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