Topic: Proposal: ads on the wiki (Read 3669 times)

yeah It ll b very great if ads are added many people are willing that.  it can be a good sorce of income to some peoole after adding ads

thank you

I see what you mean, that's quite a bit of traffic to ignore.

Round 150 of forum ads totalled 20btc for 11370k page views for 13 days, and round 149 26btc for 25000k page views for 20 days. Working that though = $0.41 CPM and $0.24 CPM respectively. This is such a small data set that its useless for anything but a ballpark figure, which is all we actually need.

Self hosted auctions require manual administration and time and are vulnerable to demand dropoffs. You'll also have to manually screen content and create the ads. There is also no penalty for running advertising cycles longer than the required time, and you get paid for impressions / clicks rather than time.

Adsense pays $0.50 - $1.00 CPM, automatically runs auctions, automatically screens users and adverts, doesn't require any advertisement and is tied back to $ to pay the costs which are in $. For something so clean and isolated I can't see any reason why adsense shouldn't be used. Using $0.50 CPM adsense would be paying $160 which should be plenty, $5k a month cheque.

What sort of functions are needed on the wiki, is it specifically content? Mods? Technical?

In the last 7 days there have been 2,240,172 requests from 152,385 unique IPs.

I can't estimate long-term ongoing costs now with any sort of accuracy because the wiki isn't on its final server yet, I'm not sure whether the final server will be sufficient, and I'm not sure how much work bawolff will need to do in the long-term (right now he's doing a lot of work to get the wiki in good shape).

The ads will need to be manually approved, and maybe new or dangerous-looking services should be disallowed.

I'd really campaign against putting ads on the wiki, or if they are then there needs to be a much higher vetting process. Consider the wiki a gateway for absolutely green users to join bitcoin and read the initial information, and so any "look at this company" add is a vouch for its legitimacy. And that would mean no gambling, no HYIPs, no cloud mining and probably only a few exchanges.

Can you give us an estimate of wiki traffic and costs, how much is saved by opening that gateway?

Well, most of the English pages aren't worth translating. I'd like to see this project converted into an encyclopedia, but right now it's a soapbox. We'd be translating advertisements people don't want to read in the first place. I'm starting a WikiProject system to organize and convert pages from ads to articles.

As for ads - I would hate to see a banner above the title. Just let us put a few words from a sponsor into the sidebar every month. We can do that without any extensions.

MagicalTux had some donations collected for the wiki a few years back - what happened to those? Lost with Mt. Gox?

edit - as for incentivized editing; I don't think that'd be unethical or bad as long as we don't make it edit count or byte count. With post count campaigns here we see just empty, meaningless posts all over the place. I wouldn't want that to happen to the wiki. We may be better off voting/debating over who deserves what, or establishing some kind of award system. "Editor of the month" maybe.

@wtogami : thx for the additional info, like I said on irc I forgot about bawolff (sorry bawolff :-)

Why is that a problem?
The technical / basic information about bitcoin itself dosn't change every week, for me the *real* problem about the wiki is internationalization: english wiki is far more complete than others (the french one for exemple need some hard work, it's on my todo...)

theymos forgot to mention that most of the cost of the wiki (aside from the hosting and DDoS protection) is the upstream mediawiki developer we hired to make it suck a lot less.  He has a lot of work ahead of him including ...

• Keep the wiki updated, secure and with the latest features.
• Rewrite the cryptopayment plugin so it is suitable for open source, allowing anyone else to deploy it.
• Currently the non-English wikis are almost dead partly because of the terrible centralauth system, and the fact that each language is effectively another wiki, making it impossible to keep translations in line.  He will deploy the mediawiki Translate plugin, then convert all of the non-English wikis to use the same login system.
• Time consuming task of reaching out to the many non-English communities and teaching them how the wiki no longer sucks with the translate plugin.  They need to work on translating each page, one paragraph at a time.

The main point of this is to incentivize contributions (currently there are only a few edits per week, which is terrible). Reducing expenses is a secondary goal. Among expenses, hosting is pretty minor -- the main expense is hiring people to do sysadmin/dev work.

Admins will hopefully be manually checking to make sure that "winning" edits are not garbage, which should be enough to prevent most potential abuse. Spammers should have zero chance of making money.


Yeah, a different algorithm may be better. That was just a simple example that came to mind. It might be good to somewhat weight each edit according to its size (nonlinearly).

But randomness is good to prevent people from getting left out, and the algorithm should avoid thinking about users too much, since it's fairly easy to create extra users to game the system. For example, you probably wouldn't want to weight users who haven't won recently, since this'd make winners just create new accounts.

We can see the negative effects in this topic... there are some guys wearing sig spam commenting in this topic for nothing.. one on them doesn't even know the link to the wiki
That why I don't want incentives for people to edit the wiki!

I (and probably most people) have no problem with ads as long as they're not too big and don't follow your around as you scroll. so yeah, I think that's ok


does the one on bitcoin wiki sub board description count? :p

I have no problem seing ad on wiki.


I agree with you. If the editors were choosen like admins choose staffs here, then theymos' idea is actually good but now, anybody can be editors and paying editors randomly is easily exploitable.

I personally have no problem with the ads and I think most people don't have any too .
If it's a help for the forums then yeah why not .

If ads are needed, why not but if not please juste leave the wiki as it!
What does the wiki need to be hosted (CPU, RAM, bandwidth etc.)... because I'd rather host the wiki myself than seeing ads anywhere!
If really needed, why not something like bitcoinity : no ads but a sponsor every month.

About the incentive to editors... I don't what to see the same noise / spam on the wiki that there is here because of paid sig.... so I'm 100% against this proposition!
Feel free to tip the last editors but I don't think a embedded system like this would be good for the wiki

That incentivises people to make more edits, eg. useless ones, in order to make it into the 50 (or to totally encompass the 50, in an extreme case). OTOH, I've made a couple of edits in the past, and while it would be nice for me to be paid for the work of others, it doesn't strike me as something particularly fair. A means of qualitatively scoring edits would be more appropriate (but I don't know whether such an algoritm exists).



If there are going to be two ads per page, one of them could be forum-like, while allowing images for the other one.



That's a quite personal matter IMO. I'd find the square one much more annoying than the properly called "banner" at the top. Maybe it's that, after roughly a couple of decades of banners, my brain is immunised against them .

Above the title would at least be annoying IMO.
Maybe floating right of ToC (on pages with it)? That seems unintrusive.
What happened with that company that was okay with just a mention in the page footer?

A couple ads will not bother most people, imo.
Does bitcointalk.org have a link to the wiki? Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see it.

I propose adding non-annoying banner ads in two places: one square slot (about 165x165px) in the left sidebar under the "tools" section and one slim rectangular slot (about 700x42px) at the top of each article above the page title.

Currently bitcointalk.org pays for all wiki expenses. This can continue (the expenses aren't all that much), but it'd be nice if the wiki could be self-supporting without much cost to usability.

After subtracting expenses (or maybe just a percentage of expenses if expenses are usually greater than revenue), the remaining ad revenue can be entirely distributed to active editors in some way to encourage more contributors. The wiki really needs more contributors. Here's a rough idea of how the money might be fairly distributed: Every month, select (say) 50 edits at random from the last month. Have the wiki admins go through them and discard the ones that are bad. Replace removed edits with newly-selected random edits. Repeat until you have 50 good edits, then split the monthly profit evenly among those edits. Publish the discarded edits to demonstrate that there was no bias in the selection.

The ads should be manually approved like bitcointalk.org ads; AdSense (etc.) would allow people to advertise phishing sites or malware on the wiki, which can't be tolerated. The ads could be sold in auctions like forum ads. Hopefully one or more of the wiki admins would be willing to handle this.

Forum ads are done using HTML+CSS, without images. This has various advantages, first among them is that it allows ads to bypass ad blockers if both the ad and the page are specially designed to do this. But this creates a lot of extra work for everyone compared to just using fixed-size banner images, so I don't know if replicating this is desirable.