On 10/26/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/10/2007, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/24/07, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
A corporation willing to invest $10M could very credibly seek to fork Wikipedia, develop an advertising supported model, and introduce
changes in
the community structure that might attact new volunteers.
Some things are more likely to happen in theory than in practice. :-) Few corporations even begin to grasp the dynamics of a community like ours. Wikia is a notable exception; they actually seem to genuinely care about building real communities, respect free licensing, etc. But look who started that company.
Wikia has picked up how much funding?
Well, according to Wikipedia's article on Wikia, they have 35 employees and have picked up ~$14 million in venture capital. According to Alexa they are currently in the mid 500s for rank among all web destinations. A CNN article from March suggested they have ~2.5 million page views per day, which would probably put them between $1 and $10 million in ad revenue per year.
And why are we wasting our time working on Wikipedia? ;-)
-Robert Rohde