No light for Wikipedia?
When I attended a presentation friday at the Episerverdagen, the phenomenon of Wikipedia was discussed and I begun to think how much is it worth and how can you monetize on it. This weekend that issue was, surprisingly, brought up again when I read about how Wikipedia might only survive 3-4 months with its current finances. This since because it solely is lives on donations and people seems not to be generous enough.
So how much is it worth? If you would let a marketer put a pricetag on it, probably millions and millions of dollars, based on the traffic and being the “top of mind” encyclopedia for millions of people around the world. In reality that apparently is far from the truth.
My suggestion to avoid this: put google ads or other text links next to the articles. Wikipedia is probably the only free encyclopedia out there and is certainly the one who has the largest depth in terms of the amount of information it consists of. From my point of view, I would be totally fine with ads in the articles and if people are not, they’re free to go somewhere else and search for information. A lot of people have issues with that certain entities on the web need money to survive, in their mindset everything should be free and its their god given right to have access to certain sources without being bothered by ads. Well, its not. Businesses, organisations and people need money to survive, somehow the web and even Wikipedia is not excluded from these basics. With ads or not I would still love Wikipedia.
I wrote this yesterday and this morning I noticed Calacanis, in his very explicit way, is suggesting similair actions.
(via Beta alfa where this is frequently discussed in the comments)
[tags]Wikipedia, money, Calacanis, ads[/tags]
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