On December 1st 2005, I attended a speech made by Jimmy Wales on wikipedia and global development. Thanks to my friend Lawrence MacDonald, whose organization sponsored the event, I got to go to lunch with Jimmy and a bunch of other people. Because those were development minded folks, most of the discussion was centered around how can wikipedia contribute to global development. Inevitably, the $100 laptop came up. Jimmy was keen on seeing it take off and empower students, teachers etc.. in developing countries. Jimmy also said that Wikipedia gets about 2.5 billion page views per month. Putting two and two together, when it was my turn to introduce myself and ask Jimmy a question, i said: why dont you monetize your traffic and use the cash to buy a bunch of laptops? (or, for that matter any other charitable purpose?). And the unthinkable happened: Jimmy replies that he had never thought about it and that is might be a good idea. I was pleased with myself. Next thing I know, today, a friend sends me this post from Steve Rubel. In there Jimmy says there will be no ads on wikipedia but leaves the door open:“The question is going to arise as to whether we could better pursue our charitable mission with the additional money [ads would bring],” he said. “We have never said there would absolutely never be ads on Wikipedia.”Should there be ads on wikipedia? Absolutely. I put up with ads on much less valuable services than Wikipedia and if Jimmy can build an ad program where let's say, only people accessing from developed nations see the ads and if all the revenues are re-allocated to charitable purposes, seems like a good deal. The key is to be transparent and wikipedia has a history of doing a good job at it.Conservative estimatesLet's say that roughly the inventory available for advertising (excluding edit pages, people from developing nations etc..) is about 1 billion page views. Let's say that, roughly, Jimmy can get $3 per CPM (using Calacanis's numbers). That's about $3 million per month, or, rather 30,000 laptops.Sounds like a no brainer to me.
wikipedia, advertising, adwords