Technology

It’s user-driven. Nothing would get archived in this case. And what if the content changes but the page remains up? What then? Fairly sure this is why Wikipedia uses archives.

That's a good point.

Pretty sure mainstream ad blockers won’t block a custom in-house banner. And if it has no tracking, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s on Archive or not, you’re getting paid the same, no?

Some of them do block those kinds of ads -- I've tried it out with a few. If it's at archive.org I lose the ability to report back to the sponsor that their ad was viewed 'n' times (unless, ironically, if I put a tracker in). It also means that if sponsorship changes, the main drivers of traffic like Wikipedia may not see that. It makes getting new sponsors more difficult because they want something timely for seasonal ads. Imagine sponsoring a page, but Wikipedia only links to the archived one. Your ad for gardening tools isn't reflected by one of the larger drivers of traffic until December, and nobody wants to buy gardening tools in December.

Yes, I could submit pages to archive.org as sponsorship changes if this model continues.

It was a much bigger deal when we used Google ads a decade ago, but we stopped in early 2018 because tracking was getting out of hand.

If I was submitting pages myself I'd be all for it because I could control when it happened. But there have times when I've edited a page and totally screwed it up, and archive.org just happened to grab it at that moment when the formatting was all weird or the wrong picture was loaded. I usually fix the page and forget about it until I see it on archive.org later.

I asked for pages like that to be removed, but archive.org was unresponsive until I used a DMCA takedown notice.