How Wikipedia Can Save the Internet With Advertising

There’s a certain kind of irony in seeing smart people ignore their own insight, as if predicting a pitfall somehow excuses them for tumbling right in. Take, for example, Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in their seminal discussion of Google, “a prototype of a large-scale search engine.” In an appendix discussing “Advertising and Mixed Motives,” the authors predict “that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” It’s what happened, and they’d seen it coming! It was foretold.

Clearly, it had to happen. Did it? There is ample evidence around the world that media organizations, when they choose to, have been able to develop imperfect, occasionally failing, but nevertheless viable institutional arrangements that have shielded newsrooms from advertising money across more decades than we’ve had digital computers.

That Google Search would be devoured by its ad business was a choice, and an outcome that could have readily been avoided by asking anyone with media experience and designing an institution to insulate search quality from short-term revenue considerations. And yet, it keeps being presented as the result of a mechanistic law of nature. Why? Because we want to believe that only the unsustainable can be pure, and that advertising must corrupt everything. This is not wisdom, but resignation disguised as common sense.

Which brings us to the thesis that likely brought you here, perhaps full of derision: Wikipedia can save the internet with advertising. I do mean the whole internet and not itself. Wikipedia itself is under threat and could always use more money to resist these attacks, but in any case, it will not stand alone long unless the rest of the internet is saved from authoritarianism as well. (And for the purists in the back: yes, I’m using ‘the internet’ to describe the entire digital sphere because that’s how people understand it, and what I’m interested in is building for everyone.)