[spodek]

Reminds me of a time I saw Craig of Craig's List on a forum in the mid 2000s. People asked him why he didn't put ads on the Craigs List. With negligible effort his company could profit hugely.

He politely pointed out that most of the companies that tried to maximize profit that way went bankrupt in the recession. Meanwhile his company was chugging along, free to do what it wanted, delivering a product its customers loved to a global audience with minimal staff, costs, or conflicts of interest.

People don't give you money for nothing.

Note to the original blogger, statements like "Capitalism won, try it," when referring to one of the most successful projects on the net, don't make them look bad. They make you look like you missed something. But that's just my perspective.

[tuppy]

This argument doesn't make sense since Craigslist is already a vehicle for advertisement. People pay for advertisements placed on Craigslist. They don't pay their operating costs through donations, they pay by having people give them money to provide a service (in this case, advertising).

[spodek]

Argument?

I said it reminded me of something and described it.

Anyway, try looking for similarities. Anyone can find differences between things, but what do we learn from that? We already know no two things are perfectly identical.

I find we learn more from similarities in things we expect to be different.

[tuppy]

Perhaps argument was the wrong word.

As a personal note, disagree about what you think we learn more from. I find differences far more interesting. If the universe was all the same it would be immensely boring. It's the differences that make us question everything else that has been the same before.

Metaphysics and all, and quite useless practically. But it's fun to discuss :)

[gojomo]

Craigslist does have 'ads', of a sort: all postings in certain categories, in certain markets, require a posting fee.

I think Craiglist, while not a non-profit, is actually a very good model for the path Wikipedia chose not to take. That is, don't just accept the default ad-inserts, but figure out a unique way to charge for promotional inserts that is complementary to your main model. (The fees actually make Craigslist better, by filtering the volume/quality of posts in certain economically-valuable categories.)

Mozilla, a non-profit, is another example. The search-engine-default that they sell is now making them $300 million a year, but at negligible cost to their users (compared to the alternative of giving that placement away, via some hypothetical revenue-oblivious process of evaluation or install-time-choice).

Once upon a time, Wikipedia could have kicked off an effort to find a promotional-placement model that was unique to Wikipedia, and considerate of concerns about the influences of commerce and advertising budgets.

I think such an effort would have yielded interesting and beneficial results: if any organization had a chance to find a way to balance concerns and insulate editorial processes, Wikipedia had a chance. And today they might be a $billion-a-year budget nonprofit instead of a $40million-a-year budget nonprofit. (That would introduce plenty of other existential risks and opportunities different from their current focus.)

But, they went another way, based on some really strong preferences from a large and important segment of the stakeholders. And, that path has still worked very well for Wikipedia. The idea that "no advertising" is a necessary part of the recipe is now core doctrine, and can't easily be reevaluated. It would take a major crisis or external challenge to change; in the meantime these discussions are just interesting thought experiments.