Wikipedia Proposals Part 5 & 6 (and the Wikipedia Weekly Podcast)

Last night I did an hour long podcast with the crew from the most excellent new podcast: Wikipedia Weekly. We discussed my various proposals on funding the Wikipedia. We came up with a fifth proposal:
  • Version 5: Add Google Adsense text ads to only the Wikipedia Search pages with users having the ability to opt-out forever with one click.
  • Version 6: Produce a Greasemonkey script that allows users to add Google Adsense to the Wikipedia. I would describe this as super opt-in because 1% of the population could probably figure out how to do it.
The search result page gets over 2M views per day. $2M views x $10-15 CPM is $20-30,000 a day or up to $1M a month. 60M searches is a lot of searches. The show will probably be out in a week or so (episode four). Here is the link to add Wikipedia weekly to: iTunes

PS - I'm thinking of going to the next couple of Wikipedia board meetings/meetups to discuss the various proposals. I would love to help the Foundation navigate these waters and would offer my services to manage negotiations with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Tags: wikipedia

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1. "offer my services to manage negotiations with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interests :)

Posted at 4:36AM on Nov 4th 2006 by Yves

2. If somebody from the Wikimedia Foundation will supply an AdSense client ID, I would be happy to write the GreaseMonkey script for option 6.

Posted at 8:37AM on Nov 4th 2006 by Scott Johnson

3. And I would be happy to use it, if it can be done.

Posted at 8:36AM on Nov 5th 2006 by Isaac

4. Jason, help me out on this. What if we were to setup an AdSense account with the primary beneficiary being some sort of trust or foundation (I'm going to call it a trust) that would exist solely to send its money to the Wikimedia Foundation? Is that very difficult to do? If we do this, anybody who wants to see ads on Wikipedia can see them. And then the trust could just send its monthly AdSense/YPN/etc earnings straight over to WMF in the form of a donation. We know that they are not opposed to receiving donations.

Posted at 1:47PM on Nov 6th 2006 by Scott Johnson

5. I don't think it is a good idea to go around the WMF. I think they should give this a try. Give the community the option to voluntarily support the WMF this way. If problems or negative effects appear they can always reverse the decision. I think a more active discussion with the WMF and wikipedians on this is what is needed. There can be substantial benefits, so it deserves the attention. I think it is possible to experiment with this without the risk of inflicting serious/permanent damage, so why not give it a try? Some people probably said that the Wikipedia concept would not work, which is understandable, but they tried it anyway and made it work, very well. And it has given them this amazing opportunity, therefore I ask them to listen to these ideas and give them some serious thought.

Maybe we can contact Google and ask them what the possibilities and requirements are. I made a comment about this on Wikipedia Weekly where you can find the podcast on this topic:
http://wikipediaweekly.com/2006/11/05/wikipedia-weekly-4-advertising-on-wikipedia/

Scott are you willing to create a Greasemonkey script for your blog as an example to show that it can be done?

Posted at 7:19PM on Nov 6th 2006 by Isaac

6. The proof of concept GreaseMonkey script is complete:
http://scottj.info/files/wikipedia-ads.user.js

This script inserts a standard 468x60 banner on all wikipedia.org pages. It's easily broken, as it depends on the presence of the "siteNotice" DIV, but I will fix that in the next iteration. The ads are service using the AdSense client ID "ca-test", so no clicks will be recorded, and no advertisers will be charged. This is strictly a proof of concept to show that the ads can be place on WP with GreaseMonkey.

Posted at 10:00PM on Nov 9th 2006 by Scott Johnson

7. UPDATE: Wikipedia is blocking AdSense from sniffing its content with the following lines in its robots.txt:

# advertising-related bots:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /

Because of this, the ads enabled by this script are mostly unchanging and not at all relevant to the content.

Posted at 10:04PM on Nov 9th 2006 by Scott Johnson

8. That looks perfectly acceptable to me, good work. Maybe Larry Sanger will consider this for the Citizendium pilot. Citizendium is already an experiment and in need of funding it seems, which makes it a suitable candidate I think. Or maybe do a pilot project with one of the smaller local chapters of Wikimedia.

Maybe do a couple polls first to see how much support there is for supporting Wikipedia this way, to see how much objection there is to people voluntarily deciding to watch ads on the Wikipedia pages to support it. Ask a couple of questions, like:
- Have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?
- Have you ever made a donation to Wikipedia?
- Would you prefer to watch ads, make a donation, or both?
- Would you be willing to participate in a pilot project of this?
- ...

The major benefactors could be contacted privately to ask them what they think of it and what their reaction would be.

I think we need to move this discussion to another site, what would be a good place? On Meta-Wiki maybe: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Posted at 11:09AM on Nov 10th 2006 by Isaac

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Toro, a bulldog

Hello. My name is Jason.
I'm the CEO of Mahalo.com, a human powered search engine. I was previously the co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey, and the GM of Netscape.

I'm currently on the board of social shopping site ThisNext. You might remember me from my days as editor and CEO of the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine.

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