For the past few days or so, Wikipedia has been running its version of a telethon: an appeal for people to donate money to the site—especially to build up its foreign language editions. I wish 'em all the luck in the world, but I'm wondering if the success of this appeal only lies in proving that no one wants to pay for content. So far, slightly under 4000 people have donated, out of a pool of visitors that's in the tens of millions. (According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site had roughly 31 million visits last month domestically in both its work and home panels.) Meanwhile, as of this writing no one has actually viewed the YouTube upload of the appeal, which is also running on the Wikipedia site itself.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Does anyone care about Wikipedia's appeal?
For the past few days or so, Wikipedia has been running its version of a telethon: an appeal for people to donate money to the site—especially to build up its foreign language editions. I wish 'em all the luck in the world, but I'm wondering if the success of this appeal only lies in proving that no one wants to pay for content. So far, slightly under 4000 people have donated, out of a pool of visitors that's in the tens of millions. (According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site had roughly 31 million visits last month domestically in both its work and home panels.) Meanwhile, as of this writing no one has actually viewed the YouTube upload of the appeal, which is also running on the Wikipedia site itself.
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2 comments:
I pay for content all the time. In fact, Steve Jobs is getting rich off my addiction to iTunes. And that's but one small example.
But will people pay for user-generated content? Doubtful.
About the YouTube video: that's not the one that the Wikimedia fundraiser site linked to. The one that was linked to from the main video page has over 20,000 views, and that considering that the main video page no longer links there, and that there are many mirrors of the same video - look in the column of related videos, and you will see more than one with the same runtime of 3:11.
Regardless, we can hope for the best for Wikipedia, and I imagine that the donations will really kick in once the large donors and corporations start adding in, not to mention matched donations - I know several people who are waiting for that to make their donation, so that it will have more of an effect.
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