ad:tech San Francisco kicked off today, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was present to give the opening keynote presentation. His speech was called “Wikipedia, Wikia, and the Future of Consumer Generated Content,” and it nicely complemented an introduction by Drew Ianni on the state of the overall industry.
Coverage of the ad:tech San Francisco conference continues at Murdok Videos. Stay with Murdok for more notes and videos from the event this week.
Ianni, who acts as ad:tech’s advisory board chairman of programming, believes we’re in the bottom of the recession’s trough and things won’t get worse from here. He pointed to growth in online video, Facebook, and Twitter as evidence. A quiet mobile revolution is taking place, too, according to Ianni. In summary, he said, this year will be tough, but the future is bright.
Then Wales stepped in. Wales stated, “Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in history,” which by itself says a lot about the online encyclopedia’s success. He also noted that Wikipedia’s 2.8 million English-language articles represent less than 20 percent of the encyclopedia’s content, making it a truly global enterprise.
So with this success lending him a great deal of credibility, Wales said the recession doesn’t pose much of a threat to consumer-generated content. Wikipedia was born out of the dot-com crash, after all, and the lack of money available at the time helped bring about the idea of relying on a volunteer community.
Wales went on to claim that Facebook’s extremely undervalued and “consumer media is becoming dominant.” Brand advertising is in some cases merging with consumer media, he said, and this can work well in many situations.
Murdok Reporter/Anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.
