Making Wikipedia profitable
The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization, so "Making Wikipedia Profitable" should be interpreted as "Making the Wikimedia Foundation a successful self-sustaining longterm nonprofit organization." Strictly speaking, monetary profit is not the objective, but at the same time a flourishing and successful organization needs to appropriately balance income and expenses, weighed against the overall mission of the organization.
Tried, Tested and Tired Methods
- Banner advertising -- by universal consensus, this would be entirely unacceptable
- Keyword advertising -- by nearly universal consensus, this would be significantly unacceptable
- Corporate sponsorship not involving direct advertising -- (for example, imagine if Google gives us $100,000 in hardware, and we put a link on every page 'benefactors', and when you go to that page, IBM is listed along with some happy talk about how they have helped us) -- I think there is no consensus here, although my sense is that most people have no problem with it, so long as the company in question is not significantly evil in some important ways.
Exciting new 21st Century Methods
- branded merchandising - t-shirts are always popular amongst geeks, print up some of the most favourite and oddball pages and sell hundreds.
- micro-payment system - add a small donation button to the top and tail of each page.
- Wikipedia cd/dvd - wait a while, bring across the majority of the well authored and editied pages to cd/dvd and add in loads and loads of multimedia content; videos, music, pictures. Package it up, sell it for a reasonable price and watch the money roll in! This is probably one of the best ways for Wikipedia to make money in the long run, there are still billions of people without highspeed Internet access (or any at all) and the added advantage of multimedia would even make it a draw for those who can get to the website.
How about an Experts for Hire page?
So-called expert sites like guru.com and exp.com get a cut from the micropayments (think paypal.com) charged by their "volunteer" subject-matter experts.
See N.Y. Times article by Lisa Guernsey, February 3, 2000 Suddenly, Everybody's an Expert on Everything: Sites Turn Questions and Answers Into a Free-for-All, but Sometimes the Facts Get Trampled for an unvarnished look at this idea.