Wikipedia Future; Toward Self Funding: Practicalities - and Online Media In General

I caught Identity question for world's encyclopaedia. Per the Marketingvox.com article, Jimmy Wales

...who told Times Online (U.K.) that "at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down."...

OK, so I went and looked, and a better contextual quote is:

...The demand for their output is already phenomenal: Wikipedia, which started in 2001, will notch up around 2.5 billion page impressions this month. According to Mr Wales, its traffic volumes are doubling every four months.

The combination of ultra-low overheads and massive readership would excite any media executive. And while the site does not carry any advertising, Wales admits it might. "There is a great deal of resistance to the idea, both from the community and from me. But at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down," he says...

From a pure business standpoint, Wikipedia could be generating it's own revenue - and I'm a big fan of projects that can fund themselves. Right now, the present funding drive has netted over $258,170.57. While I'm a fan of leveraging content to make it self-funding, I don't know that online advertising revenues would be anywhere near even that amount - which is relatively small compared to what the Wikimedia Foundation believes it needs:

...In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates spending millions keeping up with increases in demand, improving our software and methods to better ensure good quality content, and continuing work toward our goal of providing free knowledge to everyone. That sounds daunting, but so did creating the world's largest encyclopedia in less than five years. We can do it with your help....

The whole thing is simply amazing. That the Wikipedia has come this far, that the number of visits is so high, and that funding agencies who will dole out funding to NGOs for mailing lists¹ can't seem to see something that is right in front of their eyes. At CARDICIS II, at least one funding agency representative said that there was discussion about Wikipedia happening - within Agence Francophonie, the principal operator of La Francophonie. Why? Because I started the Wikipedia entry of CARDICIS. The discussion? How dependable it is. The same question everyone else is asking, but the issue becomes if people can't afford formal education or encyclopedias, the future belongs to the Wikipedia. This is a rumbling which France is loathe to ignore. They guard their language from invaders, but the walls in place cannot be enough. They have to adapt, and it seems that there are rumblings within that are shaking the foundations of an establishment began in 1635. About 370 years ago.

But where are the other funding agencies? It's fair to say that they have similar concerns. Articles like this incompletely researched article fail to take into account the latest information about how dependable the Wikipedia is - about the same as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Of course, we shouldn't expect traditional business models for media to embrace something which threatens them only because the models are so cumbersome in a fast world that they cannot get out of their own way.

Back to Advertising

So, should Wikipedia have online advertising? Morally, it's easy to take the high road and say that it shouldn't. I know on a moral level, I see problems with it - but in the same token, nobody says too much about the Wikipedia Cafepress Merchandise. Just a few days I was writing about Cafepress and Zazzle. According to something I read a few days ago, the Wikipedia Cafepress store made a bit over $600 for the year - which is a lot, considering one gets about 10% of the sale in such ventures. But even if the Wikipedia got the full $6,000 - it would still need money.

But advertising is different. GoogleAds and other contextual advertising *might* work
to bring in revenue - but to what degree? Do we honestly think that the Wikipedia could bring in $83,333 a month - and more? That seems a little silly. But it could bring in *some* funding.

Perhaps a workable solution is to show advertising only to non-registered users. That's something that Performancing.com touches on, and for the technically oriented bloggers, this stuff makes a lot of sense - we can control who sees advertising. Based on where people are surfing from, or whether they are registered or not, or even - if we so decided - their web browser.²

I have no problem with people who are not logged in seeing advertising on the Wikipedia. If they use it just as a reference, maybe they are researching something that contextual advertising will lead them to, since Wikipedia entries are supposed to have a Neutral Point of View.

Oops. We're Back Where We Started

There's a lot of talk, back and forth, about how 'blogging' and open content are changing the face of the way information is dispersed as a business. The Wikipedia is a great example because it isn't trying to make a profit, it's trying to meet it's costs. But even as we talk about all of this, and the weblog revolution and so on and so forth - it's not culture jamming; anyone with a long view can tell you that we are just reforming and remixing what is already there. There's no Utopia where people consistently write well and dependably at no cost, just as with the open source and free software communities. The leaders are making money somehow - and continuing to make money by telling other people that they can make lots of money hand over fist, like some sort of 'get rich' scheme. It does not compute. So, although parted from reality a bit, the net result is the same: It's a reformation.

Like I mentioned in a previous entry, postage penalizes people the further away they are from the source and the greater the weight. Electrons have negligible mass, so the transportation costs are much lower - and let's not even talk about beams of light through optical fibre. Every serious magazine publisher in the world is considering how to get money for quality writing. That's one of the inherent flaws with things like LinuxGazette.com: When I was involved, it was tough to recruit writers without a budget and even tougher to do so because of the split with LinuxGazette.net, not to mention making a business case. In fact, I shot myself in the foot by forcing a look at the business case. When last I was there, the ads on LinuxGazette brought in nothing compared to the costs of the magazine - they didn't even cover my salary.³

Whenever I talk to Robin 'Roblimo' Miller, we always talk a bit about this - and how so many publishing companies just don't understand that they can expect the same amount of revenue for the same object. Oddly enough, I found a friend in Henry Ford in his book, 'My Life And Work'. In Chapter Two: What I Learned About Business:

...The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the large attention given to finance and the small attention to service. That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the money should come as the result of work and not before the work. The second feature was the general indifference to better methods of manufacture as long as whatever was done got by and took the money. In other words, an article apparently was not built with reference to how greatly it could serve the public but with reference solely to how much money could be had for it--and that without any particular care whether the customer was satisfied. To sell him was enough. A dissatisfied customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up the work which ought to have been done correctly in the first place. For instance, in automobiles there was not much concern as to what happened to the car once it had been sold. How much gasoline it used per mile was of no great moment; how much service it actually gave did not matter; and if it broke down and had to have parts replaced, then that was just hard luck for the owner. It was considered good business to sell parts at the highest possible price on the theory that, since the man had already bought the car, he simply had to have the part and would be willing to pay for it....

Here we are again, with a different technology. Where Tesla pondered communication as a form of human energy, again, here we are.

Using The Personal Guide

In the end, I suppose I use myself as my guide. When I need something and the available prices are above what I can afford, I don't buy it - which derives from understanding my personal budget, as well as understanding the value of whatever it is that I need.

A good guide nowadays is that the less I need something, the more I get SPAM about it - be it sex toys, Viagra, or lonely housewives. This has created, at least for me, to an almost complete desensitization for advertising like that. But I do look at advertising on websites, because some of it is useful... it mainly depends on which website I go to.

Another personal guide revolves around how much I expect to generate. There is advertising on my sites - and they don't make much now, and I don't expect that they ever will. But if I could get them up to $500 a month, that means I'm writing a retirement fund.

Realistic expectations. That's the core. There are anomalies that create lots of revenue, and it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to hook people on what their wallets scream to be opened for - but that's not who I am, and I don't believe that such sites add any value. That's a moral decision. And it's not too different from the moral decision of advertising on the Wikipedia.

While it's apparent that print media has to work on catching up, it's also apparent that internet media have to catch up to print media when it comes to revenue - while not losing the 'market', which are customers who are, generally speaking, humans. The speed with which information can be disseminated, at a lower cost, has people screaming for lower costs - be it at the news stand or on the internet. Prices have to go down, value has to stay up... and with an increasing world population, that seems intuitively possible.

If you're really interested in this sort of stuff - keep track of New Media Musings, where J.D. Lasica covers stuff along these lines all the time.

¹One rumor in the Caribbean region is that one NGO got $800,000 U.S. to run a multilingual mailing list for 3 years. That's a lot of money for what equates to a server, Google translation tools and a combination human translator/interpreter/moderator.
² In fact, someone should write a script which keeps people from seeing ads for Firefox if they are already using Firefox or Mozilla. I'll look into that today...
³ I had ideas, but SSC wasn't in the 'mood' to experiment. So I'm trying out the ideas myself. A few work, most suck, that's the way of it... but increasingly, more work and less don't. That's 'experience'. :-)