> Yes there are, And Wikipedia would have to pay gatekeepers to prevent it becoming a spammy "wack-a-mole" fest. Those gatekeepers become a very costly additional expense. One that you very quickly become dependent on,
Only if they want to sell lots of different ads. If it were "buy the one ad slot on Wikipedia for a day for $150k" (that's supposedly the going rate for Twitter's promoted tweets, IIRC), quality control wouldn't be very hard.
I think this would work well just for the homepage and nothing else.
The main issue I have is an irrelevant ad plastered across every page would be pretty tacky. Having relevant ads on article pages would work better but there are a few problems with that:
a) Each article isn't of equal value in terms of advertising, which would make pricing much more complicated, which would also increase costs involved.
b) Pages (or whole topics) with rented ad space could be subject to spammy tactics to increase the amount of visitors, such as dubious SEO techniques (the Wikipedia domain would make this easy). I haven't thought about this deeply enough but it could be a huge problem since it can't really be controlled.
The ads almost have to be irrelevant, or there'd be accusations of bias. An ad for Google above the Bing article would cause a lot of criticism.
It could be kept tasteful - something akin to how NPR does it, it could be a bit of text up the top right... "Wikipedia is sponsored by [Google Chrome] and readers like you".
Only if they want to sell lots of different ads. If it were "buy the one ad slot on Wikipedia for a day for $150k" (that's supposedly the going rate for Twitter's promoted tweets, IIRC), quality control wouldn't be very hard.