| After Wikia Search failed, there's no risk in Google further subsidizing the growth of Wikipedia so long as Google then gets to scrape back much of the value add via their knowledge graph & Wikia is primarily monetized via Google AdSense. It makes sense Wikimedia didn't see an immediate donation drop. In terms of a conversion funnel, the people who are using Wikipedia for the first time are not likely to donate. My guess is most of the people who are most likely to donate a small amount here or there are the regular users who regularly seek out the site. The drop in donations due to the lower exposure would take years to kick in, because now with 20% or 30% fewer users, there will also be less new future power users who would donate in say 2018 or 2019. But offsetting any decline there for a company making over a billion a month in profits shouldn't be too substantial. Sergey Brin donates a half-million a year grant to the Wikimedia foundation & Google has also donated a few million. It is also worth mentioning the knowledge graph now often contains affiliate links for things like music, ebooks, and so on. Over time more and more knowledge categories will have paid affiliate links in them (say booking a restaurant, heading to a concert, etc.) In some cases Google may temporarily make a link type free to try to drive adoption and awareness, but over time it will be the same sort of scrape-n-displace they've done with hotel bookings. They not only turned the "organic" hotel search listings into a second set of paid ads, but now they are also testing having some users convert and buy the hotel booking while on Google.com - just like they are doing with their car insurance offering. And they have also added links to cityname hotel searches in their knowledge graph in order to drive more people into that "almost nothing but ads" funnel. You can see the net effect of that sort of displacement on an industry by looking at all the consolidation in travel. Expedia acquired Travelocity and Orbitz. That leaves Expedia, Priceline & TripAdvisor as the remaining 3 big players. And even with TripAdvisor Google offered them and Yelp an ultimatum to allow Google to scrape/steal their reviews & if they wanted to opt out of that theft then they could use a robots directive to block Googlebot from indexing their site. That monopolistic abuse was so brazen it actually managed to draw the interest of regulators and politicians. Eric Schmidt did a fantastic job of misdirection & fibbing at the 2011 congressional hearing (ref http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html ) but the regulatory & political reviews forced Google to back away from at least that form of monopolistic bundling. Though, of course, the same sort of behavior continues to this day in other forms. From just yesterday there's both
https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 &
https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928 |