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September 21, 2006
Wikipedia Ads on AdSense? "Not Ours," they say.
Uber-blogger and Edelman PR honcho Steve Rubel spotted some peculiar ads when he did a search for "crowdsourcing" on Google. As he said earlier this week on his Micropersuasion blog, some paid search ads in the results pointed to Wikipedia, the "free and open" encyclopedia run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
So is Wikimedia taking people's donations and running AdWords campaigns to drive traffic? Not according to several Wikimedia volunteers that replied to Rubel's post and a spokesperson contacted by ClickZ.
"As far as I am aware, the Wikimedia Foundation is not purchasing Google ads, or any other advertisements for that matter," Wayne Saewyc, a Wikimedia spokesperson, told ClickZ.
In the comments on Rubel's post, David Gerard, a PR volunteer for Wikimedia, put it bluntly: "We've never needed or wanted to pay for advertising and don't have money for anything other than servers and bandwidth anyway. We're probably *too* popular and our servers are melting as it is!"
Alison Wheeler, CEO of Wikimedia UK, added: "Money we raise goes on hardware and direct operating costs, not on advertising (which, frankly, with our ratings would probably be superfluous)," she said. "We've found that a number of people have this incorrect idea that Wikipedia can drive traffic to their (commercial operation) Web site. It can't, or rather it won't as when we find such SEO / spam linkages we take action to remove them. Wikipedia is a free and open Encyclopedia, not a tool to support commerce."
It's being speculated that the ads were bought by someone who had links in the crowdsourcing entry, but since Gerard said he has removed all the links in that entry, it's hard to imagine why the ads are still running, or who might be behind them. Is there a Wikipedia secret admirer out there with some spare ad budget?
Posted by Kevin Newcomb at September 21, 2006 12:19 PM
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We can all agree that spam linking in Wikipedia serves nobody but the spammer. But, let's also be honest -- Wikipedia drives tons of traffic off site. I'm not saying it's the best thing in the world for marketing and web traffic, but for Alison Wheeler to protest so much, it's kind of funny to watch. If Wikipedia is so poor at driving traffic to non-Wikipedia sites, why don't the folks over at Wikia.com open up their server logs to the public, and show us the "non" impact of the more than 3,000 outbound links from Wikipedia.org to Wikia.com?
I'm sure it's comforting to Wheeler to hear herself say that Wikipedia takes action to remove spam links, but that's like saying I help fight the world's air pollution problem by walking to the mailbox.
thekohser September 21, 2006 10:41 PM