[lambda]

The objection to something big and obnoxious that interrupts your use of the site is only one of the objections to ads. Yes, the pledge drive is annoying. But it only happens for a month or so a year, and it doesn't have all of the other problems associated with ads.

Other objections are that the advertisers would be the ones paying Wikipedia, and thus have the ultimate control; they can threaten to reduce advertising revenue in order to get objectionable material removed, they would incentivize people to put more advertising-friendly content that would draw people to lucrative pages and entice them to click on ads.

Ads are also a security and privacy risk. Advertisers who can inject content into pages can do varios nasty things. And advertisers tend to track what you do; tracking your Wikipedia browsing habits would likely be quite lucrative.

One of the worst things about the internet today is that so much of it is funded by advertising. This gives companies no incentive to act in my best interest; their only incentive as far as I am concerned is to get me to look at their page, so I can look at and click on ads. They are beholden to their advertisers, not their users.

[anamax]

> Other objections are that the advertisers would be the ones paying Wikipedia, and thus have the ultimate control; they can threaten to reduce advertising revenue in order to get objectionable material removed, they would incentivize people to put more advertising-friendly content that would draw people to lucrative pages and entice them to click on ads.

The same is true of contributors as is the response - get different contributors/advertisers.

> They are beholden to their advertisers, not their users.

They lose advertisers as soon as they lose users, so users control their advertising revenue.