Below is my letter to Wikipedia in response to their begging for money. Please comment to this post after reading. I want to read what you have to say.

Hello Wikipedia

For a website that hates the standard advertising model that most every other website on the Internet uses to generate funds, you’ve managed to stoop even lower by begging for money with a very large and obnoxious banner ADvertisement on the top of your site pages.

So now, not only are you “ADVERTISING” with that large, out of place yellow banner, you are begging for money inside of a typical ad banner on the top of your site.

wikipedia begging for money

You could design your site to offer ads on the side, like Reddit, or on the top of pages that were not so obnoxious as that large, yellow, begging banner ad, and you could generate enough funds to grow and support a larger team, and you could create an even better website for users with more funds and more manpower.

As a user of Wikipedia, I could care less if you run continuous ads on the side or on the top of all your pages that are not obnoxious and yellow. I think I also speak on behalf of the millions of users who visit your site pages who also don’t care if you place ads on the sides of your pages.

Seeing these large, yellow, obnoxious banner ads on the top of your site pages that beg for money is worse than seeing a perfectly capable doctor standing on the side of a road with a large sign begging for food or money. You are perfectly capable to get a job the way every other person in the world gets a job in order to generate cash.

99 percent of the websites on the Internet follow the standard advertising model, but you seem to feel this need to buck that model for whatever mindset you’ve managed to lock yourself into, and then you end up lowering your standards by begging for money. Doesn’t make any sense.

There is nothing wrong with the popular Internet advertising model as long as you don’t let it get out of hand like Yahoo does with stupid blinking ads or ads that jump all over the page.

I will CONTINUE to use Wikipedia as long as it is free and I will NEVER donate money to your website as long as I know you are perfectly capable of generating funds through non obnoxious ads like that yellow ad you are using now.

Why don’t you take a consensus about how people feel about ads on the sides of pages that don’t get in the way of the information and ask people how they feel about those ads compared to you begging for money with the same banner advertising model you are using now, that you say you are so against using.

So what if you started out with this thought process of not offering advertising in the beginning for whatever mind frame you’ve managed to get stuck on. People won’t care if you change that model and start advertising on the sides with ads that are not obnoxious. Facebook changes all the time and people bitch about it for a day or two and then they get used to the changes. No big deal.

Get with the program and get with the times.

Your yellow, begging banner advertisements are obnoxious and irritating.

Leave a Reply