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Comment by joe_91 | Hacker News Reader

While they may have enough money year on year - as someone who has been donating yearly for the past 10 years I prefer that it stays ad free.

It is a fantastic resource and while is a need for increased transparency, more fiscal responsibility etc. Is there an alternative resource out there that provides as much value to the world? I'd be happy to switch and start supporting something else if so.

It would be rather sad to see donations drop off and the project shut down... I know this would likely never happen with the amount of value it offers at this stage but still...

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I'd rather they just ran an ultra transparent ad network and capped maximum spend at $100 and banned groups or individuals who tried to get around it.

This would be less risky than donations as it would ensure it doesn't rely on any groups in particular for cash who might have dirty laundry to hide.

Like big tech.

> capped maximum spend at $100

They would need 100,000 advertisers to earn $10 million, which seems impractical.

For comparison, they earned $120 million in contributions in 2020.

That said, Facebook has 8-10 million advertisers, many probably running low budget campaigns. But low budget campaigns typically only work when they're hyper-targeted / personalized (something I assume we don't want Wikipedia to do)

While I'd usually agree, I'd say Wikipedia has a great opportunity to target ads without predatory data harvesting - they can simply be put on relevant pages. Maybe not as effective as user-level targeting, but probably still some decent opportunities there. And easy to have advertisers bid for space on more in-demand pages.

This would be absolutely horrible for me. Ads are designed to distract us and manipulate our emotions or identities in order to get us to spend more money than we need to spend. Wikipedia as it is now is a counter to those distractive, manipulative forces.

I think you underestimate how much advertisement would influence such a website.

There are very strict content rules with most advertisement networks and threading over those will severely limit the income from ads as those that run advertisement often do not wish to be associated with various content.

Consider what happened to TVTropes, which at one point decided to remove articles that dealt with a variety of sexual subjects as it was very bad for their advertisement revenue that the articles even existed on their website.

If Wikipedia become dependent on advertisers, it would have to tailor it's content to accommodate them.

Of course, it's content also influences the number of donations they receive as it is.

Running an ad network is fairly expensive on its own if you want any value out of it. You need targeting, campaign management, some sort of bidding auction, CTR/CVR prediction models (or some sort of intelligent targeting), fraud detection models, reviewing ads, page exclusions, etc. All of this at massive scale.

edit: And customer service, people who spend $100 tend to be angrier all too often than people who spend $1,000,000.

You don't need all of this.

Just define a price per day/week/month and that's it.

That's how advertisements in newspapers work since ages, without any overhead.

Except this isn't 1950 and internet advertising exists. Why give $100 to wikimedia for advertising for ads that perform badly when you can give it to Facebook or Google or Twitter for ads that perform well.

OK, worst comment of the day for me and it's not even 9am.

Jokes aside the whole point of Wikipedia is to be ad free. That's literally the whole thing about it. The rest is made by contributors.

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