New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model
Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there.
In 2004, Mr. Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. “If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work,” he said. “But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything.”
So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users — free — were more informative than those written by freelancers.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of wikis,” Mr. Herrick said. “But I’m not sure how many of them will make money. “
Others are more optimistic. Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million.
“I would never have paid this much for any other domain,” Mr. Gotts said. “I can’t think of one that would be worth more.” He pointed out that the site Wiki.com drew traffic before he bought it, even though it had little content.
Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden — and profit from — the wiki concept. With financing from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Star Wars-focused Wookieepedia to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.
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