The ads almost have to be irrelevant, or there'd be accusations of bias. An ad for Google above the Bing article would cause a lot of criticism.
It could be kept tasteful - something akin to how NPR does it, it could be a bit of text up the top right... "Wikipedia is sponsored by [Google Chrome] and readers like you".
There are a lot of issues with putting advertising on a site dedicated to providing unbiased information to the public. Advertising is, I think you'll agree, very unbiased information.
You can argue that users will be able to distinguish between the ads and the content, but Wikipedia serves a very diverse community -- children, the elderly, people who can't read very well, people who are more-or-less computer illiterate. If even a small percentage of them are confused by the ads, Wikipedia will have failed in a small way.
(FWIW, I've seen technically-literate peers get confused by the current banner too, thinking the person pictured was the person the article was about.)
So all the merchants that can't buy an ad aren't trying to subtly insert ads as content currently? Advertisers only have one choice now--try to get a mention, try to get a link, perhaps as a source--do whatever it takes to get into the content of the article.
If Wikipedia sold ads, they would have the alternative to buy an ad instead; I don't see how the problem of advertisement-as-content would be worsened when given a choice to buy an ad. If anything, I think it's the other way around.
Yeah, it's not like I really care if the banner ad is for wikipedia itself or for an advertiser. It's still an intrusive banner ad. Plus since it's for themselves, they probably go a bit further on the intrusiveness scale.
If you follow the history of Wikipedia, ads have been discussed many times. The consensus has always been "no, absolutely not."
If the WMF put even a single ad on Wikipedia as an experiment, there would be a community uproar and probably at least one fork (much as the Spanish Wikipedia forked years ago under threat of ads, and didn't rejoin for years, even though the ads themselves did not persist.)
Make that ad obvious to be an ad (different background?) instead of doing shit like barely visible "oh, have completely unrelated search results" like they do in YT...
I'm happy they don't go down that route. And I wish they don't waste energy on discussing ads.
If we keep going with the cancer analogy: When I read about metastasis on Wikipedia, what kind of ads do you think I would be shown if they'd show ads? Benign ones?
I like NPR's approach to broadcast ads: their own commentators read a short little script, rather than playing an audio clip that was provided to them. There are various ways this can and has been applied to Internet ads, like making them text-only.
On the other side of things, I would love to see a search engine that pushes sites down in its rankings proportionally to the obnoxiousness of their ads.
Ads on Wikipedia might take the form of a banner at the top and bottom of the page or they might take the form of suddenly the page for Nestle only talks about how great the company’s products are and doesn’t mention the Colombian death squads or child slavery.
I'm on the same boat. But furthermore, I'd like ads to be related to the content of the site I'm visiting. Say I'm on Quanta reading an article about black holes, how about show me an ad for a book on dark matter. Instead of an ad for a pair of shoes I searched a week ago. Contextual ads make so much more sense to me.
Can't you just use the context of the information? like put a technology related Ad right below a post related to technology, granted is not nearly as relevant, I think that's kind of like what Reddit does.
You're basically asking to show ads that are even more irrelevant and useless to your users?
The best ads for publishers and users are ones that are relevant. If you want to display something that is irrelevant to the user and ineffective for the advertiser, you might as well not display ads at all and avoid annoying your users.
It could be kept tasteful - something akin to how NPR does it, it could be a bit of text up the top right... "Wikipedia is sponsored by [Google Chrome] and readers like you".
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