After a week of testing, we made a decision to keep ads on the free wikis.
To bad, bye wikidot. Not that the actual decision matters really, I already lost my confidence in future times. It was inspiring. Your software rocks! I was very impressed. You also managed to make me believe you were as allergic to ads as I am. How naive.
Now today, Wikidot is a grown-up service with 300,000 users. When we look for ways to be certain of income, it is not greed. It is responsible management.
Obviously. Any project that has costs needs income. There are however many ways to solve a problem. This is a reminder how much we must truly appreciate projects like linux, wikipedia, mozilla, php, python, blender, musicbrainz, imslp, etc… All of which are top quality, have a lot of users, and thus costs, and don't make them pay, nor watch adverts. That is the difference between a community project and a commercial project. If you believe in something, you do whatever it takes. That is why I prefer to provide no content above ad-supported content.
We have great plans for Wikidot and you'll never regret using it for your sites. That is a promise.
Please, there is no need to make it worse than it is. You already make me regret spending all those hours creating stuff that I could have spent on other projects. And that by breaking a promise. At least stop making more promises then.
We are displaying ads on carefully-chosen ~3% of all pageviews, this is still far away from brute-force pasting AdSense code into the generic page templates.
Very true, and at the moment they are not even obtrusive, but times change as you have just proved, and 3% of non obtrusive ads might not generate income satisfyingly.
I think any aware wiki admin is able to disable ads in no-time.
Yes, that gives me the same feeling as when I go shoplifting in the supermarket. There is a fundamental difference though. The supermarket never inspired me, on the contrary. They hate me and I hate them, but one has to eat.
Don't do this please. Be straight torwards your users. Tell them what you are prepared to offer them, and what you expect from them. If you want them to be able to opt out, offer it to them in a way they can trust. Basically make a binding terms of use that disables yourself to ever force it on them in the future. Otherwise ask them not to disable them, even if you never take repressive action against those who do. Now you are playing a game. You are saying, hey, we will put the ads there against your will, but you might hide them. In the future we might forbid you to hide them though. This way you waste more of people's efforts and time if they would fall for this trap.
This seems to insinuate that it is ok for the ignorant, non-geeky users to suffer the adverts and pay for the rest of the wikidot free users. Do you really think that these ignorant people will be the ones with big traffic that will make the difference? People with big traffic will either take the profit from the adsens, or disable them. They would be stupid if they didn't, no?
Unfortunately, things might not only go pear shaped for us users, but maybe also for wikidot as a whole. Forcing a lot of small users that have little traffic, and thus little potential income, but also little costs to show adverts can have negative effects. First, compared to other wiki farms, wikidot is no longer so inspiring. Some people won't join, and some people will leave (like myself). Those people will no(t) (longer) promote wikidot. Income of a moderately inspiring project will always be "not quite enough", so the goal that justified putting all those people off will likely not be reached. Less popularity, less pro sales, less developers, more work for you. You end up with moderate profit from a hard labor dayjob, which will no longer be the inspiring dream it once was. And all that while a more inspiring project might as a side effect generate much more profit from those voluntary adverts than forced ads on a less inspiring project might ever do. It is the kind of microsoft vs google company policy I think. Who is smarter in the end? Would we all by using php if way back it's author would have decided to make pro plans for it, and limit its free uses? Would we all have put so much content in wikipedia in a similar scenario? Would we consider moving from windows to linux if linux were adfunded by non-obtrusive ads on its desktop?
Obviously, I hope this worse case scenario will remain fiction, but if it doesn't, think back.
I sincerely which you the best, even as our tracks separate,
greets,
Naja
michal frackowiak 1235399982|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
(account deleted)
