Is Wikipedia Getting Desperate For Money?
Duncan Riley writes over at 901am that Wikipedia has expressed financial difficulties unless it gets more funding real soon. I agree with Duncan that this smells of an attempt, indeed, to get sympathy from the general public.
In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.
Does Wikipedia really need money to keep on running? Probably, yes. It is one of the most visited destinations online (I’d say 30% of my daily surfing is on Wikipedia—checking out episode recaps of my favorite shows). And that amount of traffic requires a ton of processing power, bandwidth and people to make sure nothing screws up. But should Wikipedia really have difficulty sourcing funds? I think not.
After all, as I just said a few sentences ago, Wikipedia is one of the most visited destinations online. and it’s only reasonable for a site of Wikipedia’s stature to be able to raise funds easily.
However, it may not be that easy for Wikipedia to find a good business model. First and foremost, it’s seen by the public as a trustworthy and authoritative source of facts and information. Wikipedia practically controls the truth. Now any monetization activities might just taint that reputation. If Wikipedia starts to get corporate sponsorship, then there is a risk that the site gets branded as a sell-off (possibly biased towards the interests of the advertisers). If Wikipedia gets acquired/bought by another company (say any one of the biggies like Google, Microsoft, News Corp, etc.), then there is also a high likelihood that the site might be seen as serving the interests of its new owners.
Is it really that difficult to make a business out of Wikipedia? Well, in the first place, I would say something of Wikipedia’s status in the community is really difficult to turn into a business in the first place, if it intends to keep the trust value high. When money is involved, there will inevitably a general perception of self-serving interests being catered to.
But Wikipedia has to keep afloat. It would be useless if they choose principle over money but end up closing shop.
Here’s one question to you: Would you feel comfortable having ads served on Wikipedia pages?
Sponsors??? if that’s what keeps it running why not? Now… the questions is, where will sponsor links be placed? It shouldn’t be on the wikipedia articles itself but rather on some place recognizable as an sponsor link.
Secondly, make it relevant.
j4s0n said this on February 12, 2007 10:36 pm
Angelo, problem is that Jimbo the most fervent fighter against ads is on wikipedia. Remember some months ago when Calacanis offered to take over the financial site of Wikipedia (well kind of : sponsor Wikipedia with AOL).
Reactions like Jimbo’s are of course very appreciated in geek scene, but does Joe average really care about them few ads.
Lets just have a look at the amount of free members at flickr and last.fm. I admit I pay for last.fm without ads. Everyone (well at least 3 people) know my gripe with flickr, but then again recently I also became a paying member. And no ads looks nice.
Thing is, the average user doesn’t care about ads. As long as there is info on the sites. The hardcore geek whether has his ad blockers in place, whether doesn’t mind to pay $2-$3/month if the service is worth it.
If I would spend 3-4 hours daily at wikipedia, I wouldn’t mind paying them few bucks, just to support the service. Hell, I’d even donate regularly to Akismet because I like the job Akismet does.
But of course Jimbo is in a favorable position : he has already managed to get $2mio. from Bezos (go to wikia.com to follow your recaps, much more info than on wikipedia ;-)), so why not try to get some more from Bezos. And of course Bezos/Amazon can offer Wikipedia the expensive hardware structure.
Just like Yahoo and Google have done in the past with acquisitions.
In the end I think it will all come down to this : the internet is narrowing itself to the Big 3, Google, Yahoo and Amazon (watch them, they are broadening their non-eshop influence).
...
franky said this on February 13, 2007 6:28 pm
I stick to claims I have made in the past (here) that Yahoo needs a blog platform, and in the Wiki area they have Yahoo Answers. I think Yahoo is becoming the new AOL, main stream and not to geeky. Your Joe average platform.
Google has everything (so far IMHO) and has Jotspot. GOOG is working hard at becoming the MSN for small companies, and will gather much of knowledge for own further development by targeting that sector.
Where is Amazon/Bezos in this picture? To me Amazon (reviews) have lately become the new CNET. I hardly ever read professional reviews anymore. Engadget and Gizmodo are pretty close to the status of professional platforms (read magazines) too. I already left (have always said I tend to leave before anyone else does).
But Amazon reviews have bite IMHO and S3 will become the platform to watch (surely now RoR properly works together S3).
You feel it coming : Amazon will become the new uber (ugh I said it) geek/nerd platform.
Another stupid prediction of mine? No, watch my words.
franky said this on February 13, 2007 6:29 pm
Dammit, Franky. Are you sure you’re too busy with work to blog for JOAB?
I’d have to cut your comments into two since long comments keep screwing up the image background. Thanks for that insight. I think it’s worthy of a full blog post in itself.
Anyway, here’s an interesting take by Tony Hung at deepjiveinterests. The donation model seems to be the way to go here. So it should not just be user-generated content, but also a user-supported site!
jangelo said this on February 13, 2007 8:43 pm
Thanks for the comment split.
I surely think I still have ideas, and some insight, just the echo chamber time fails.
A post can incite one to comment, tickle me and I’ll comment.
Writing daily, and wanting to be opinionated JOAB worthy, means you have to read everything happening. The time therefore isn’t there. I am no problogger (and couldn’t either with my English ;-))
flickr and last.fm, user-generated with ads, or a fee for more services, are the only sustainable free services long term.
There needs to be an income, because the better the service the higher the costs.
And we both know the importance of connections, not only for income but also for hardware structure.
What killed Performancing (metrics)? The cost. What makes Snap sustainable? Click a thumbnail and every affiliate click that gets generated afterwards is theirs. Is Snap long term sustainable? If they egt popular internet wide, they will need a sell out policy otherwise the costs will become too high.
(next comment)
franky said this on February 13, 2007 9:38 pm
But lets face it. Sites like flickr wouldn’t be sustainable without the support of a big one. Just look at last.fm and all the dbase outages there are lately. No matter how many members pay (think statistically there are 5% paying ones?), once you get really big you generate traffic and have very high costs.
Web2.0, user generated and spread the link love without target=_blank?
Forget it! We are evolving to back to the old AOL platform strategy. Grow and keep everything on your own structure. Only that way you’ll keep the revenues to yourself.
And blog networks are the perfect example of this. We’d rather link to our own blogs than to another blogger.
Am I wrong?
And now I have to go read Tony, guess that’ll lead me to Mathew Ingram… who’s next? Nick Denton, Michael Arrington?
And 4 hours later I bet I will want to post. Uh huh.
franky said this on February 13, 2007 9:45 pm
[...] Or perhaps Google has plans for eventually gobbling up Wikipedia, too, sometime soon. It’s always a possibility, especially given that Wikipedia seems to be looking for a more sustainable business model. Tags: google, Gossip, new media, reference, resource, social media, The Internet, Useless Reading, WikipediaShare and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
This Is What Happens When You Get Big! » Jack Of All Blogs said this on March 6, 2007 5:14 pm