Why ads?

World66 is an open content travel guide. It's free as in speech and free as in beer, so why are there ads on almost every page? It's a question we get every now and then and we think it deserves a response.

The obvious reason is: we get money when people click on them. And although World66 works only because thousands of travelers worldwide write about the place they visit, we have to spend an lot of time keeping the site in shape, we add features, we moderate. We're pretty busy doing that and we have costs. The ads are there to cover these costs.

There are of course other solutions to generate income. We could ask people to support the project and put a paypal button so that they can make donations. Wikipedia does that and for them it seems to work. But I don't see why that solution is better. They ask people who really like the project to pay for everybody else. We do not have to ask for money, but get some income because some of our visitors choose to click on ads.

In the end, we think ads work best. We believe there is a group of users for whom the ads actually add something. We use Adsense and Adsense does a great job putting quite relevant ads next to our travel content. You are likely to find ads from hotels in Stone Town on our Zanzibar pages and in some cases the information displayed in the ads may be just what that visitor is looking for.