Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion
Thank you, Michael, for your critical note on the assertations concerning the huge sums of money. I didn't stand still at the fact that most of our Wikipedia pages have very low click rates. - Recently I read that 4% of our pages cause 50% of our traffic. The idea of Liam is interesting that we could have adverts on Special pages because those are genereated automatically. In Germany there was a discussion about adverts on www.wikipedia.de (which is owned by WMDE, unlike de.wikipedia.org). But even then, I am afraid, people will say anyway that there are ads on Wikipedia with the negative consequences for our reputation. And people might think that they don't have to donate anymore because Wikimedia makes money otherwise. The biggest danger remains the repercussions on our editing community. A loss of even only 10-20% of our power users would be very negative, especially in the smaller language communities. Personally, I am not such an opponent of adverts in general, and I would not mind to have a Wikimedia large voting on the subject. This should be only undertaken, nonetheless, if there is a substantial group of Wikimedians who really wants to go the advertising way. Kind regards Ziko 2010/11/8 Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com: On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote: As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic. I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for good or ill. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Ziko van Dijk Niederlande ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion
On 6 November 2010 01:20, Seth Finkelstein se...@sethf.com wrote: Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of sites rank highly. Err from google's POV it's in their financial interest for sights that feature their ads to be high in the SERPS. Large numbers of people going to a site which doesn't host their ads means large numbers of lost clicks on google ads. As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion
On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote: As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic. I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for good or ill. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On 6 November 2010 03:43, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 00:53, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable. Thanks for making approximation! I was thinking that WMF and chapters would have much more money with ads. However, ~$100M is not so bigger amount than $20-22M. Besides that, all chapters except WM DE are far from reaching the limits (while WM DE is not so close to reach the limits). Also, organizations should have capacities to spend money, which should be built through the time. In other words, it seems that we definitely don't need ads. No, we don't *need* ads. But think how much we could improve our infrastructure and software with that money. Think how much content we could help to free. And think how much more international we could become. Personally I think the sacrifice we'd make by advertising is too great, but you have to at least admit it's a tempting proposition. Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006. Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to $100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-30/Wikipedia_valuation Pete / the wub ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006. Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to $100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-30/Wikipedia_valuation Pete / the wub That's capitalized value, but does reflect an estimate of net annual revenue of at least $500 million. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On 6 November 2010 10:56, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006. Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to $100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-30/Wikipedia_valuation Pete / the wub That's capitalized value, but does reflect an estimate of net annual revenue of at least $500 million. Oops! Those are the estimated revenues, but obviously should have been in *millions* not billions! My mistake. Pete / the wub ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 11:38, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: No, we don't *need* ads. But think how much we could improve our infrastructure and software with that money. Think how much content we could help to free. And think how much more international we could become. Personally I think the sacrifice we'd make by advertising is too great, but you have to at least admit it's a tempting proposition. Wikimedia organizations (WMF and chapters) don't have capacity to spend $100M now; it will have it in few of years. And money from fundraising is increasing well, which means that $100M will be reached probably in that amount of time. Anyway, here's some analysis of this very question done back in 2006. Estimates for annual revenue from adverts ranged from $42 billion to $100 billion, and that's without accounting for our growth since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-30/Wikipedia_valuation Fred said that annual revenue is estimated on $500M. I would say that the potential is much higher and that it is comparable with a developing country with 10-20M of inhabitants. However, unlike three years ago, we are now in the phase when other factors are much more important than money. Structuring the network of organizations and global movement itself is much more important than getting money which is not possible to spend in this moment of time. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Facebook isn't the greatest analog. One of the limitations is that Facebook isn't really an information site. Content rich sites tend to do better at generating advertising dollars because ads can be targeted to things that people are already searching for. Let's consider a different rough approximation. About.com About.com is part of the About Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the NY Times. According to their annual report [1], the About Group unit of the NYTimes had an annual revenues of $121 million in 2009. The About Group includes About.com, ConsumerSearch.com, UCompareHealthCare.com, Caloriecount.com and various minor sites (but it appears that more than 90% of their traffic goes through About.com). According to Alexa, these sites collectively accounted for 0.043% of global pageviews. (Compare to 0.53% for Wikipedia, 4.7% for Facebook, and 5.2% for Google). So scaling About.com's revenue to Wikipedia's traffic share would estimate $1.5 billion / year. Like the Facebook estimate, this is also a very rough approximation. An astute observer would note there is a very large range between the $90 M suggested by Marcus's look at Facebook and $1500 M suggested by this look at About.com. Personally, I believe the truth would probably be closer to the high end than the low end, largely because About would seem to be a better analog of what we do than Facebook is. But I also think it would be interesting to look at other comparisons. -Robert Rohde [1] http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2009/2009NYTannual.pdf ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On 11/6/2010 4:19 PM, Robert Rohde wrote: On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Facebook isn't the greatest analog. One of the limitations is that Facebook isn't really an information site. Content rich sites tend to do better at generating advertising dollars because ads can be targeted to things that people are already searching for. Let's consider a different rough approximation. About.com About.com is part of the About Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the NY Times. According to their annual report [1], the About Group unit of the NYTimes had an annual revenues of $121 million in 2009. The About Group includes About.com, ConsumerSearch.com, UCompareHealthCare.com, Caloriecount.com and various minor sites (but it appears that more than 90% of their traffic goes through About.com). According to Alexa, these sites collectively accounted for 0.043% of global pageviews. (Compare to 0.53% for Wikipedia, 4.7% for Facebook, and 5.2% for Google). So scaling About.com's revenue to Wikipedia's traffic share would estimate $1.5 billion / year. Like the Facebook estimate, this is also a very rough approximation. An astute observer would note there is a very large range between the $90 M suggested by Marcus's look at Facebook and $1500 M suggested by this look at About.com. Personally, I believe the truth would probably be closer to the high end than the low end, largely because About would seem to be a better analog of what we do than Facebook is. I agree that About.com is a better comparison, and one I touched on in the Signpost a few years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-02-28/Vertical_search). And it's interesting to see that maybe the site's revenues could begin to justify the price the Times paid for it after all. But in our context, I think it's worth mentioning reasons why scaling the revenues proportionally would likely produce erroneous estimates. By working toward a particular market niche, About.com can draw a decently reliable if unspectacular audience. It will never be the destination of first choice, but most of what's there has enough value in advertising terms that it can be monetized. In fact, it is easier to monetize than Wikipedia, which would be much less efficient to sell ads for, both on the high end and the low end. At the bottom of the scale (from an advertising buyer's perspective), Wikipedia has a huge swath of low-value inventory consisting of little-trafficked pages and material of extremely marginal commercial interest. This is almost inevitable for sites with a massive scope, which is why there's still some appeal to Facebook as a point of comparison, and the problem is trying to package or even give away remnant inventory. You get a different problem at the top of the scale. For the stuff that really draws massive attention, topics where Wikipedia really shines - a tsunami, a new pope, a pop star dying - efforts to monetize such traffic spikes elsewhere have proven largely ineffective. Trying to market that inventory to advertisers is like chasing a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow: you can't recognize the right inventory, connect with the right potential buyers, or do an effective job of selling it fast enough before the traffic has passed you by. Considering the problems at both the top and the bottom, part of the reason that About.com has survived this long may be by occupying the middle. In terms of selling ads, Wikipedia might be able to command a premium for its prominence, in the same way that advertising in the New York Times carries a premium because it's a paper of record to so many people. But in many other ways, Wikipedia is not a great proposition against which to sell advertising. Perhaps it should be no surprise that this is so, considering that Wikipedia was not designed or built for the purpose of being a great
[Foundation-l] Left on the Table
How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
I'll bite - it's about time for our yearly advert flame war anyway. The answer is 0 dollars. That is because as soon as we put the advertising up we lose credibility and Wikipedia is no more. - Brian On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On 5 November 2010 22:44, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Less than one soul. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
Billions is not the appropate word here. Extrapolating from my own personal Adsense experience, I would suggest that with a single ad per article, the project would only earn perhaps 1 to 5 million a year. That's being generous. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
Billions is not the appropate word here. Extrapolating from my own personal Adsense experience, I would suggest that with a single ad per article, the project would only earn perhaps 1 to 5 million a year. That's being generous. W The question has nothing to do with signing a contract with an internet marketing company that offers us a few pennies. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion
Fred Bauder How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of sites rank highly. If you seriously want to make a reasonable estimate, take a look at the closest similar types of sites which are commercial - e.g. about.com, answers.com, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo.com, Gawker (sorry!), etc. That would give a ballpark figure in terms of current Google practice. Skip the feel-good stuff about the community only being willing to do free work for an unsullied cause. The veritable Co-Founder Himself has a $14 million dollar venture-capital backed endeavor (Wikia) based on the theory that such an idea is false. Are you calling him and his marquee investors stupid? :-) In fact, Wikia's relative lack of profitability (it may be slightly profitable, but it's certainly not a money machine) is a pretty good indication that such monetization is quite difficult. Even with all the marketing and public relations advantages that Wikia gains via a halo effect from Wikipedia's prominence, it still doesn't rake in big bucks. So slapping a Google Ads box on many pages doesn't print money. Given the risk that it could actually kill the goose that lays golden SERPs, err, eggs, it won't happen. -- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/ Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 00:53, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable. Thanks for making approximation! I was thinking that WMF and chapters would have much more money with ads. However, ~$100M is not so bigger amount than $20-22M. Besides that, all chapters except WM DE are far from reaching the limits (while WM DE is not so close to reach the limits). Also, organizations should have capacities to spend money, which should be built through the time. In other words, it seems that we definitely don't need ads. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
