This week we will be running an experiment involving placing small number of contextual ads on a free wikis. To support our servers, a lot of development time and all the growing costs it takes to provide solid and fast wiki hosting, we are looking for optimal ways to keep Wikidot as free and open as possible, and to provide service to both our free and paying subscribers. And keep everyone enjoying using Wikidot.
We will begin placing ads shortly to see if it's worth investigating or not. Ads will be kept to the minimum (we will be only showing them to a subset of non-logged users), so probably you and your regular users will not even notice them. All Pro and Educational sites will obviously not be showing ads. Also sites that use AdSense on their own will not be affected.
We dare think there is a way to keep everyone happy, including you, Wikidot users, your visitors, ad publishers and us, developers and maintainers of Wikidot. We will try to make the ad system behave much smarter than simply inserting ads in a brute-force or random way, and we still want to follow our idea of not polluting sites by ads.
The tests will finish by the end of the week and then we will decide if we want to continue displaying ads. We are open to all comments and opinions — the last thing we want is to do things that are not acceptable by our users.
We will keep you informed about the progress!
UPDATE: I think we have found a good balance for our ad system. More details are available on the advertising page.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me