Commentary

Mitch Wagner
Executive Editor, Community  

They're Giving Away The Product, But Making It Up In Volume

If you're selling information on the Internet, it doesn't matter how much people get for free -- the only thing that matters is how much you sell. The recording, movie, and commercial software industries don't understand that, but Jimmy Wales does. Wales co-founded both the not-for-profit Wikipedia and for-profit Wikia, which announced a bold new strategy to "give away-for free-all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites." Wikia will let people build sites using MediaWiki, the software that underlies Wikipedia, along with the hardware and infrastructure to run those sites. Publishers can keep the revenue; all that Wikia demands is that the sites link back to Wikia, which is advertising-supported.

If you're selling information on the Internet, it doesn't matter how much people get for free -- the only thing that matters is how much you sell. The recording, movie, and commercial software industries don't understand that, but Jimmy Wales does. Wales co-founded both the not-for-profit Wikipedia and for-profit Wikia, which announced a bold new strategy to "give away-for free-all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites." Wikia will let people build sites using MediaWiki, the software that underlies Wikipedia, along with the hardware and infrastructure to run those sites. Publishers can keep the revenue; all that Wikia demands is that the sites link back to Wikia, which is advertising-supported.


More Internet Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Giving stuff away as part of a business model is nothing new on the Internet -- Netscape pioneered that as a business strategy more than 10 years ago. But is Wikia going too far?

The article doesn't say but I suspect that Wikia hopes to use the giveaway to hook customers, and then get revenue from consulting services down the road. Nothing dishonest: A publisher plays around with Wikia's free tools, and says, "Wow, this online community stuff is complicated!" and Wikia says, "Sure is. Want some help?" Many companies won't seek that help from Wikia, but those companies don't matter much to Wikia's bottom line, so long as enough companies do.

Wikia co-founder WikiAngela says: "It's completely free; free as in beer, free as in freedom, and free as in content, software, bandwidth, storage and computing power!"

Amazon.com recently took a stake in Wikia, at the same time Wikia bought sports community ArmchairGM.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links