Wikia, formerly called Wikicities, announced a $4 million Series A round today. The financing was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, and had participation from angel investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and Mitch Kapor. David Cowan of Bessemer also wrote about this on his personal blog.
Wikia is a for profit venture by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. It hosts topic based wikis on a number of subjects, and anyone can add new ones.
Current traffic for Wikia is fairly non-existent, although Jimmy Wale’s wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked sites on the web and I’m sure that the investors are assuming that he’ll be able to drive a similar level of user loyalty. Fighting against that will be the less-compelling subject matter and the fact that this is a for-profit company.
I’d love to see an overhaul of the wikipedia and wikia writing interface, however. They have plenty of great examples to borrow from.
It really amazes me how much money Wikipedia can raise.
Does anyone know what their business model is going to be? It cant simply be adwords on pages can it?
Hey, I am just trying to figure out how a journalist for a regional paper made so much money to become an angel investor.
Honestly, how much money can these guys make? Where’s the business model?
Hopefully some of that money goes into the development of MediaWiki, the software underlying Wikipedia and also my wiki project: Wikicompany http://wikicompany.org
It will be interesting to see if their add-driven business model gives enough returns on this investment.
Wikicompany is a free content, worlwide business directory build by the community.
Anyone in the world can quickly create a company profile using this webform: http://wikicomp...ecial:WCPublish
To understand the differences between Wikipedia and Wikicompany, please read: http://wikicomp...any_v_Wikipedia
Other interesting features:
http://www.wiki...y:Semantic_tags
http://www.wiki...ikicompany:REST
(Mike: If there is interest in an review article on TechCrunch about Wikicompany, just let me know.)
Jama Poulsen
(founder Wikicompany)
info@wikicompany.org
Jama Poulsen
(founder Wikicompany)