Making Money with Wikipedia-based AdSense Sites

Part of my self-appointed mission is to describe various ways you can make money with AdSense and related technologies. Well, here's a dirty little secret: some AdSense publishers make money by monetizing Wikipedia content. So how do they do this and is it legal? Is it even ethical? Let's take a look.

The Wikipedia

The Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia”. It is a community-based project to build a free encyclopedia capturing and organizing as much human knowledge as possible. There are other, similar projects associated with it (such as the Wiktionary, but the Wikipedia is by far the best known and most controversial of the projects.

The controversy comes from the fact that the Wikipedia is created and maintained by a legion of unpaid volunteers. Anyone can add or edit the information in the Wikipedia, unlike other encyclopedias which are normally written by contributors with specific, recognized expertise in a given field. Needless to say, this approach leads to some dubious content and tit-and-tat between different groups trying to make their viewpoints and theories known. As with any human endeavour, there are a lot of politics behind the scenes at the Wikipedia.

That said, the Wikipedia is gradually becoming a trusted source for information. Google trusts it, certainly — the Wikipedia home page has PageRank 9 (out of 10), one of the few sites to reach the that lofty height. Answers.com, itself only a PR 8, uses the Wikipedia as one of its data sources.

Why is the Wikipedia trusted? Because the community is vigilant about protecting the information from those who choose to corrupt or warp it. While individual pages may need cleaning up from time to time, as a whole the Wikipedia seems to be doing a good job of compiling information.

Wikipedia = Free Content

The other distinguishing characteristic of the Wikipedia is that its content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This license grants anyone the rights to reuse the Wikipedia text for any purpose providing a number of conditions are met. For the full details you should see the Wikipedia:Copyrights page, but in essence the use of the GFDL places no restriction on what you do with the material provided:

• any modifications or additions you make to the material are also licensed under the GFDL,
• you credit the source and/or authors of the original material, and
• you provide a copy of, or a link back to, the original material.

Essentially, the GFDL is a “viral” license that ensures that material licensed under the GFDL stays free.

Note that the GFDL is not the same as putting material into the public domain. Public domain material is material that has lost, or is ineligible, for copyright protection. The GFDL relies on copyright law, despite what some may think, to provide its power, because only the copyright holder may authorize the reproduction of copyrighted material. When the copyright holder uses the GFDL, they are providing everyone with an irrevokable non-exclusive license to use and modify the material as long as the copyright to the material holds. (Of course, once material falls into the public domain then all bets are off and anyone can do anything with it, although other intellectual property laws may still protect the material in other ways. If the copyright to Mickey Mouse ever falls into the public domain, for example — which has not yet happened because the US Congress keeps passing copyright extension laws to make big companies like Disney happy — Disney will still own the Mickey Mouse trademark and will be able to stop many things that would infringe on that trademark.)

Wikipedia = A Multitude of AdSense Sites

The Wikipedia has so far resisted the lure of content monetization. However, this doesn't mean that Wikipedia content isn't being monetized. Far from it.

There's nothing stopping you or me or anyone else from taking content from the Wikipedia and using it to create a niche site for a specific topic. Imagine building a mortgage site based on the material in the Wikipedia mortgage page and related pages. It's been done, trust me. And it's perfectly legal as long as you follow the attribution and linking rules of the GFDL.

Of course, many of these sites don't follow those rules, and that's where things get sticky. Ethically and legally, it's wrong. But that doesn't stop it from happening.

Shouldn't the publishers worry about duplicate content penalties? Yes and no. If they can get non-search engine traffic to the site, they won't care how high it's listed in Google. Or they can modify the content (though the threshold needs to be pretty high for the modifications to count as “new” content) and/or add value to it in other ways.

The Ethics of Wikipedia AdSense Sites

Let's assume you're following the rules of the GFDL and are building a Wikipedia-based content site to be monetized via AdSense. Is this even ethical?

Absolutely. The GFDL does not restrict commercial use of the material, no matter what the individual contributors to the Wikipedia might favor or think. They agreed to provide their material under the GFDL when they submitted it, and so they have to swallow their dislike of AdSense and other monetization schemes and accept that others will seek to profit from their work.

One use of Wikipedia material for the small AdSense publisher is as a way to link two or more sites using the technique I described in Six Degrees of Web Separation: How to Link Multiple Sites.

However, and I've said the same thing before in reference to public domain material, it's in your best interest to add value to the material you take from the Wikipedia. Or else rewrite it to be your own entirely and not subject to the GFDL. So really I think the Wikipedia is best used as a starting point for further content. Wholesale copying isn't a good long-term strategy unless you can drive traffic to your site somehow. Start with the Wikipedia material, sure, but compile/classify/review material from it and other sites in order to create your own unique (or semi-unique) content.

Sponsored Link: Speaking of rewriting old material, The New Think and Grow Rich was launched today and is climbing the Amazon charts. Or you can try recycling eBay content with Build A Niche Store.

Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

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