Wikia & Hidden economies
Last night I found out that Gil Penchina is the new CEO of Wikia.com. I spoke with him briefly about Fleck.com when we just got started so I do have some interest in his carreer. Today I took a closer look at this service and what I found reminded me of a post I wrote a few weeks ago about Hidden Economies.
I think every visitor of WikiPedia.comorg at some point wondered ‘How could I make money using this phenomena’ and several people actually started services to monetize on it. Wikia.com seems to be a serious one and they might have discovered the Hidden Economy behind Wikipedia.
I wonder how it will turn out but I’m sure Penchina didn’t jump ship (from eBay to Wikia) if he didn’t clearly see it.
Do YOU see it too? Share it with us in the comments please…
BillyWarhol said,
June 10, 2006 @ 11:22 am
Wikia believe in free software & Free BEER!!
) so they are definitely getting my Vote in the next Fleck Web2.0 Democratic World-Wide election*
;))
p.s. i couldn’t find the “hidden economy” but i’m still thinkin*
outlaw ads widget*
Jackson said,
June 12, 2006 @ 5:12 am
Hidden economy? There aren’t any ads, but perhaps donations. There’s a hell of alot of pages though, and pictures. That must be alot of bandwidth.
Oh, and it’s WikiPedia.org.
Not everyone is governed by capital though, although it may not seem so, the concept of the human ’spirit’, and even humanity; is still somewhat alive.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten said,
June 12, 2006 @ 6:02 am
Hi Jackson, I agree that not everyone is driven by money but Wikia received VC money and hired a CEO. I don’t think the VCs are doing this as a hobby and do expect to see a good return on investment. My question is where the money will come from at Wikia.
And thanks for the correction. I changed .com to .org!
Peter Reitsma said,
June 12, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
Well I guess these one-topic Wiki’s attract fairly big amounts of visitors with similar niche interests, like Star War fans e.g.
This should make these Wiki’s very interesting for AdSense.
So, great one-topic websites for free, no cost for the content creating, and lot of single-track-minded visitors visiting your pages.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten said,
June 12, 2006 @ 12:57 pm
Hi peter, you description reminds me of Squidoo.com. And you might be right about Google Ads but I would be disapointed if that was all…
xaurav said,
June 13, 2006 @ 3:05 am
if ebay shud provide games , like fo blackberry
http://www.blackberry.co.nr provides
Joe said,
June 13, 2006 @ 3:25 am
Hmm… not sure. This looks typical like some project which should attract many, many users. Which results in many special interest niches (the long tail effect), which then could be monetized in many possible ways.
I only can think of highly targeted advertising, auction partners (eBay?), subscriber benefits (like what? Flickr has the bigger amount of larger photos, that is lacking here).
Oh, and wait, maybe some more elaborated profile matching, for subscribers only. Like e.g. linkedin.com: you get more search- and contact abilities if you pay the fee.
BTW, the service IS ad-supperted, see Advertising. And I’m seeing adsense stuff in the right margin (maybe just added a few secs ago?)
Anonymous said,
June 30, 2006 @ 12:43 am
Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. It has to do with one of those golden rules. But, of course, I’m not actually going to tell you about that.