Wikipedia Thinking Advertising : Google, Yahoo or Who?
Wikipedia may be on its way to profiting via serving online advertising says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to the Times Online. Wales tells The Times “at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down.”
Sure volunteer “wikitopeans” may go up in arms over the addition of ads to Wikipedia, but companies like Answers.com have been built around republishing Wikipedia content on pages with served advertising, and why shouldn’t Wikipedia benefit a bit more for its efforts? Perhaps a portion of the advertisements going to charity will help the transition Wales ponders “how the charitable mission could be supported by money raised through advertising.”
Tig at Marketing Vox brings up a very strong point that “Wikipedia is ideally suited for online advertising: It now receives around 2.5 billion pageviews per month, and traffic is doubling every four months. It was the ninth-fastest-growing website in 2005, according to Nielsen/Netratings.”
If Wales & company do decide to go paid advertiisng, next question would be, which contextually targeted advertising network do they sign on with; Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, or possibly a smaller contender like AdBrite? Wouldn’t Wikipedia be quite a coup for a new MSN contextual network!
Should Wikipedia “sell out”? If so, which contextual ad network would you recommend?
