Wikipedia Leaves $100M On The Table
Did you guys remember Jimbo's post from last week about the $100m dream:
Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen.
http://web2.commongate....lion_Dream
The "wallet" is none other than Jason Calacanis, and "of course" is not his wallet but AOL's.
Calacanis now writes:
I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia--for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.
Jimbo: please reconsider!!! I know I can get AOL to sell the inventory at zero cost to you guys and we will donate the bandwidth. Just give us a little 25x25 pixel thank you (i.e. "Hosted donated by AOL." That's it.
Note: I'm bringing this up again a good friend pointed me to this very, very conservative valuation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia if it was a private company would be worth $5B.
Note2: I'm not a saying change anything else about Wikipeda. I'm not saying make it commercial--I'm saying put a leaderboard up to make the world a better place. $100M in donations would really help the world--heck, it would change the world!
Note3: In my mind it is unconscionable to not monetize the Wikipedia when a leaderboard would do NOTHING to take away from the project. Let's do it people! Even if it's not with AOL, give the inventory to John Battelle or Google to sell--every day that goes by we lose a million bucks that could change the world.
http://www.calacanis.co...econsider/
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