Lemmy.World Announcements

28381 readers

2 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages 🔥

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)

Donations 💗

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Join the team

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why do instances not run ads? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

117 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.

Is running ads really that taboo?

EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of "millions of users", which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Wikipedia gets a lot of funding from billionaires and corporations. It's not going to be easy for most instances to be funded entirely by user donations long term.

Wikimedia Endowment
In January 2016, the Foundation announced the creation of an endowment to safeguard its future.[93] The Wikimedia Endowment was established as a donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation, with a stated goal to raise US$100 million in the next 10 years.[94] Craig Newmark was one of the initial donors, giving US$1 million.[95] Peter Baldwin and his wife, Lisbet Rausing, donated US$5 million to it in 2017.[96]

In 2018, major donations to the endowment were received from Amazon and Facebook (US$1 million each) and George Soros (US$2 million).[97][98][99] In 2019, donations included US$2 million from Google,[100] US$3.5 million more from Baldwin and Rausing,[96] US$2.5 million more from Newmark,[101] and another US$1 million from Amazon in October 2019 and again in September 2020.[102][103]

As of 2022, the advisory board consists of Jimmy Wales, Peter Baldwin, former Wikimedia Foundation Trustees Patricio Lorente and Phoebe Ayers, former Wikimedia Foundation Board Visitor Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation, investor Annette Campbell-White, businessman Niels Christian Nielsen, and venture capitalist Michael Kim.

The Foundation itself has provided annual grants of $5 million to its Endowment since 2016.[104] These amounts have been recorded as part of the Foundation's "awards and grants" expenses.[105] In September 2021, the Foundation announced that the Wikimedia Endowment had reached its initial $100 million fundraising goal in June 2021, five years ahead of its initial target.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Wikimedia_Endowment

edit: removed "most"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have contributed money repeatedly to Wikipedia and will continue to do so (I have no interest in editing). I'm not rich.

If you want to really measure the support for Wikipedia, you have to include the editing. That's hard to measure in dollars but I'm sure it dwarfs the 'billionaire' contributions.