Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas:
1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working.
2. You could license your debugging code/technology.
3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes might be interested in your product.
4. You could ask for donations to support the site.
5. You could make it social. Have people vote on regexes. Have another complementary site where people contribute test-cases for common regexes like phone numbers, dates, email addresses. You could hold competitions in different categories.
6. You could offer a cloud-based regex parser. I know it sounds a bit absurd, but I want to throw this out there in case it leads to other neat ideas.
7. You could save regexes and have people vote them up. You could have discussion threads around regexes.
4. You could ask for donations to support the site.
If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compliance that they will voluntarily pay even if it is unlikely that the site owner would ever find out about their unauthorized corporate use.
Yes, and as the fifth most popular site in the world, that is a pittance. They could be making billions with unobtrusive advertising. Given their traffic, the fact that they only raised $25 million last year means that nearly all of their users ignored their pleas for help. Further, when they do their begging, it is very obtrusive and disruptive to the user experience. Where alternative revenue models are available, begging shouldn't even be a consideration.
One concern I saw mentioned was that after receiving advertising revenue, Wikipedia might become reliant on it, which would allow an advertiser to exert influence over the organization, such as demanding for articles to be removed that are negative to the advertiser's interests, with a threat to pull advertising funding.
But yes, I agree, it seems possible for WP to accept advertisement without compromising on its core values. Decide in advance never to give in to such demands, and do not take the funding for granted.
Deciding not to accept advertising might be short-sighted. With enough years of advertising revenue, Wikipedia might be able to work toward financial independence (where returns on investment exceed costs), and build an endowment like the sort that powers top universities.
They could set up a separate non-profit organisation (that donates its proceeds to the wikimedia foundation) to sell and manage the ads. Place the organisation in a city far from any wikimedia presence to counter casual contact. Put in the charter than there can be zero personnel overlap between the businesses at any level and that nobody at the ads company is allowed to edit any article on wikipedia or any reason, much less hold any admin credentials . Embrace openness: Publish as much as is practical about every deal, and make sure all ads on the sites are directly referenceable back to the deal in which they were purchased. Publish the names and resumes of all account managers.
That's true only if a site strictly uses a contextual advertising system. Most high-traffic sites sell specific ad space and time (AKA an ad campaign) to the highest bidder in order to supplement their normal advertising network.
Even if Wikipedia used the most unobtrusive, low-key advertising system possible, people would still react negatively because Wikipedia is known for having no advertising whatsoever.
Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.
>Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.
maybe? but compare wikipedia's uptime to, say, twitter or reddit. Advertising dollars do not always make for reasonable Engineering decisions. (I'm not saying that advertising causes twitter or reddit to go down often; but they both get dramatically more revenue per user. I mean, dramatically more revenue per user, and they both have terrible uptime vs. wikipedia.)
Average cost per user per month in 2012-2013 is roughly $0.007[1]. They also achieved a quite high CTR and donation rate with their banners[2]. Do they really need to trade independency and users trust for (hypothetical) billion-worth ads? One should also keep in mind that non-for-profits must spend all their money in the year.
Perhaps they could, but what could they do with those billions that actually furthers their goals? They're having enough trouble handling the income they already have.
According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.
To pile on with business ideas - consider creating a "regex academy" to give out certificates to people who complete your regex course and pass your exam. Your website will draw users, and graduates will flaunt their credentials, drawing more users. This will give people a sense of accomplishment for having invested the time. Also, add some sort of Q&A thing, a-la stack exchange, so regex masters can earn karma by helping others.
Another idea - an interviewing tool. If someone comes to me and says he knows regex, I sit him in front of your website and have him complete a test you will have created for that purpose. Your tool would grade the applicant, so as a hiring manager I won't have to know regex to understand if the applicant knows regex. $20-$50 per test sounds reasonable to me.
1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working.
2. You could license your debugging code/technology.
3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes might be interested in your product.
4. You could ask for donations to support the site.
5. You could make it social. Have people vote on regexes. Have another complementary site where people contribute test-cases for common regexes like phone numbers, dates, email addresses. You could hold competitions in different categories.
6. You could offer a cloud-based regex parser. I know it sounds a bit absurd, but I want to throw this out there in case it leads to other neat ideas.
7. You could save regexes and have people vote them up. You could have discussion threads around regexes.