Ethical website advertising?
The web is one of those strange places where people expect things for free. The reason is quite simple – and that it’s because all of the internet’s "good" and "services" are virtual, they aren’t tangible doohickeys we can break and sell for spare parts. However the reality is that in providing that service, no matter how much cheaper it’s getting by bulk datacenters, still costs money.
Each webmaster should be well within their rights to try and monetise websites, at least to the point to cover running costs. However in my opinion people’s perceived view of what is "ethical" advertising is skewed at best. Some people say that all advertising is bad and ethical advertising is a banner or two that will be removed once the payment quota has been achieved. Others say advertising is only ethical if the contents of the advertisement are from one-on-one deals or with related content. Another group calls ads ethical as long as they don’t follow the ad format conventions and aren’t popups – in fact, if you take off your leaderboard ad from the bottom of your page, make it a unique square shape and plaster it in a "dedicated" section, people are less likely to consider it unethical. Of course there’s also the extremists who believe any ad on a webpage is the sign of the devil and use browser extensions to rid themselves completely of it.
The reason I’m asking this question is because I’m wondering whether or not WIPUP should have ads or not (or any other monetising factor). Right now WIPUP is sponsored by our very lovely host OpticEmpire who has been just plain awesome. However it’d be fair to give back to them, as well as reward developers (no, I’m not saying this just because I’m the only developer at the moment). But WIPUP being an open-source project, any concept of "salary" is considered taboo. Obviously this is all hypothetical as there’s no way that WIPUP can at this stage generate any respectable amount of revenue (and even if I wanted to dump an ad, there’s no space in the layout :P).
The obvious finger-pointing scenario right now is Wikipedia. They’re asking for money from their users. Directly. Some consider that ethical, whereas I find it downright silly why they could not’ve just invented their own ad format that wasn’t particularly intrusive and made clear positive from normative, charged advertisers, and then users could continue to use it perfectly for free without regular campaigning hubbub. Now let’s questions again whether asking money directly is ethical given an accepted alternative.
I think the major blockade here is that people are confusing with open source software and provision based on open-source software. I’m wondering if there’s been any standard already set on dividing revenue gained through any open-source initiative where there is a party paying actual money to provide the service, and there is another party not paying money, but spending time creating the service. For the sake of simplicity, let’s disregard marketing or transport costs for physical developer meetings.
Any thoughts?
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