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Visit any Wikipedia page and you'll see at the top a big, bold font personal appeal from site founder Jimmy Wales who once again is asking for handouts. His plea starts off by letting visitors know Wikipedia is the No. 5 website in the world, serving 454 million people each month and dishing out billions of page views. Maintaining its modest army of 400 servers and 95 staff costs money, and advertising has no place on Wikipedia, Wales says. As for your cash, well, that's a different story.
"If everyone reading this donated $20, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year," Wales states on Wikipedia's donation page. "But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.
"This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50, or whatever ou can to protect and sustain Wikipedia."
If that's not enough to convince you, there's also a blog post outlining 5 reason why you should fork over your hard earned cash to the Wikimedia Foundation, one of which is redundant (No. 2 states Wikipedia is ad free, as you're already reminded on the donation page).
The decision to maintain Wikipedia as a donation-funded site isn't a cut and dry one, and there are people who would like to see Jimmy Wales embrace online advertising. ZDNet's Stephen Chapman is one them, and he has a plea of his own: Stop begging for donations and start implementing ads. Chapman contends that ads don't have to be annoying, and on the contrary, it would be easy to police them so you don't turn away visitors adamant about not visiting an ad-funded version of Wikipedia. Those users are probably using Adblock anyway, Chapman says. Moreover, Wikipedia wouldn't have to rely on Google Adsense if it didn't want to "because companies would practically trip over each other to have their ads displayed to 454 million people every month!"
Do you agree with Chapman and think Wikipedia should finally switch to an ad-supported model, or are you okay with multiple donation drives each year? Sound off in the comments section below.
Comments are closed on this article
keyboardJuice
November 17, 2011 at 10:08am
a wonderful free service. i mean c'mon people i bet you would hate to see ads for boner pills on that website.
aether
November 16, 2011 at 7:33pm
While I would love it to remain ad free, I think they should adopt the pandora music business model. Subscribers/Donaters get ad free usage and non-subscribers/donators don't. I think it's the best of both worlds and it gives us users a choice while making their business economically viable. It also wouldn't hurt to give donator's exclusive access to some special feature with wikipedia to give people more incentive to donate (again like pandora, where they give users access to a sleek streamlined windows gadget to control pandora). What this might be I do not know, but I am sure they could whip something up.
livebriand
November 16, 2011 at 6:15pm
Honestly, this might be worth donating to. I imagine their server expenses really aren't that high, considering the amount of visitors, because all the content is user-generated. That said, as a student, I'd really prefer to not fork out any money.
tornato7
November 16, 2011 at 4:14pm
I donated. Even just one unobtrusive text ad on the left sidebar would give them enough money, though.
alexw1234
November 16, 2011 at 3:45pm
Ads are fine. Between adblock and flashblock, i never see them.
jgrimoldy
November 16, 2011 at 2:22pm
In the abstract, an ad-based model, especially a judiciously applied one, sounds like it'd work. In practical application though, it's a poster-child for the "slippery slope" crowd. Like a "temporary" tax, once the ads are there, they're never going away.
This whole thing feels like a contemporary PBS pledge-drive. It'd be really nice if Wikipedia got government grants.
lhatten
November 16, 2011 at 8:55pm
Speaking of "Slippery Slope", would not it be wonderful if the government controlled er donated to them. Then the government could 'lean on them" er ask them to modify content. No thanks. Would much rather have the "PBS" pledge-drive than that. Donate.
tekknyne
November 16, 2011 at 12:54pm
Chapman and those who reinforce the ad-based model to which most websites subscribe can shove off as far as i'm concerned. Once net-neutrality hits, we'll have nothing more than a shiney version of TV around here. Keep my internet pure, clean and commercial free.
Rants aside and while I understand that ad-revenue is vital to many websites-do you think if companies/people weren't pouring money into all this ineffective marketing horse-sh**, we'd all have a little more dough to spend on things that are actually useful like Wikipedia?! THINK ABOUT IT.
PS: Wikipedia rules. I donated, have you?
aether
November 16, 2011 at 10:58pm
Net neutrality is mainly about QoS from a data delivery perspective and ISPs, not advertisements. But yes an Internet without ads would be beautiful. The thing that angers me more about ads is not that they detract from the content of interest but that these ads which are for the most part totally ignored by people amounts to a HUGE amount of wasted bandwidth. And taking it one step further, this leads to a huge amount of wasted energy.
