Wiki.com partners with MindTouch, says $3m domain is a deal
Marshall Kirkpatrick
49 comments »
Entrepreneur John Gotts has agreed to pay almost $3 million to purchase the domain wiki.com. With skeptics saying that he’ll back out of the deal through a contract clause or that the purchase is a huge sign of a bubble, Gotts announced today that he has teamed with San Diego based wiki provider MindTouch to make a serious wiki play with the domain name at the center of their strategy. MindTouch does appear to offer a quality product, which I’ll discuss more below.
Gotts says the nearly $3 million he agreed to pay the “naming and trademark services” company Dynamo was a great deal. Gotts insists that he is going to complete the deal, which consists of a series of monthly $10,000 payments leading up to a large sum to complete the purchase. Wiki.com is the most natural URL imaginable for people interested in Wikis, Gotts says, and he intends to end his advertising budget at the nearly $3 million he’s paying for the URL and the $8 per year it costs him to renew his ownership of the domain. It worked for him with AdWare.com, which redirects to PCSafe.com, where Gotts sells adware removal software he claims has been wildly successful. There’s very little information available about PCSafe except for one damning report that Gotts insists is inaccurate.
Gotts said in a discussion on Digg when the purchase was announced that his business model would be to sell JotSpot licenses but now the partnership with MindTouch appears to be the plan. “We will also provide links to Wikipedia, Wiki News and WikiIndex.com,” Gotts wrote. “We will see how it all ends up but this is an exciting venture and one that I believe will benefit the Web.” Sounds like some nauseating domain squatter rationalization to me.
One way or the other, Gotts says that “domains are magic” and the traffic that wiki.com will pull in naturally as wikis grow more mainstream will make $3 million end up looking like a great deal. Out of the 50 million plus blogs on the web, Google only finds 487,000 pages in the site blog.com, so I’m not so sure that hordes of people will be looking to wiki.com to get all their wiki needs filled. I think most people compare service providers before they start populating a web site with information.
The MindTouch adaptation of MediaWiki does look like a viable product, however. MindTouch will provide the software and hosting for wiki.com wikis. The software looks good, it’s MediaWiki with a WYSIWYG editor, friendlier navigation, attachments and page hierarchies. You can create an account and test it out at http://techcrunchtest.wiki.com.
Gotts will drive traffic to the site, MindTouch will serve up subdomains and they will share advertising revenues. The serious business model will emerge soon, but is based on supporting ecommerce type activities on wiki pages.
We shall see, we shall see. Maybe this will all end up being a beautiful story someday, when we all have wiki subdomains at wiki.com.
“Entrepreneur John Gotts has paid almost $3 million to purchase the domain wiki.com”
Are you pulling a Newsweek on us (Digg/Kevin Rose story) ? Please. He did not pay that amount but thanks to the free converage you give him he just may.
Sorry, tried to note the agreement but have clarified upon getting your comment. Thanks.
All I know is, whoever came up with using “naming and trademark services” as a euphemism for domain squatting is like the Tiger Woods of slinging bullshit.
Thanks Marshall.
There are a number of people, including myself, that John has wasted our time completely with purchasing talks over the years that resulted in nothing.
Best of luck to him and congrats on pulling off that kind of PR for almost nothing, including techcrunch coversage.
In my book though, he is toasted.
“The serious business model will emerge soon, but is based on supporting ecommerce type activities on wiki pages.”
When I read that I think http://shopping.yahoo.com/
But perhaps on a more esoteric level. Hmmm.
“All I know is, whoever came up with using “naming and trademark services” as a euphemism for domain squatting is like the Tiger Woods of slinging bullshit.”
You better understand what domain squatting is before you throw accusations. “Wiki” is a descriptive term and is being used in that manner.
ginchy : Nobody has a trademark to Wiki. It’s a generic term. They aren’t doing anything shady. You’re telling me if you could go back to 1985 you wouldn’t register every common word domain?
“ginchy : Nobody has a trademark to Wiki. It’s a generic term. They aren’t doing anything shady. You’re telling me if you could go back to 1985 you wouldn’t register every common word domain?”
This reminds me of the domain section at SES last week. To the best of my memory, someone asked the crowd how many own domains? Only a handful of hands were up. Next Yahoo’s Josh Meyers went on stage and said.. “Maybe the better question is how many of you would register domains if you knew their value today back in the early 90’s?”
That tells the real story of generic/descriptive domain names.
is wiki.com really going to help get more users? Can web domain name be a competitive advantage?
In my view, initially it may, but eventually best service providers do prevail, so I am not sure if $3M of payment is worth for initial advantages.
Instead, he should have bought couple million domain names with the same 3mil and some of may fetch in future more returns than what he is expecting make now. j/k
Since Wiki is a generic term and Wiki.com a descriptive generic domain I find these blurbs entertaining. We are seeing amazing results for signups at Wiki.com and I certainly thank you all and wish you the best. Clearly this was the right move, we will certainly finish our deal for the domain and I thank you all for your interest and the best sub-domains are being snapped up as we talk.
The point you all miss is that there is great value in generic domains and the traffic they generate. Is this so amazing? If I said I was going to spend $3M on advertising over the next few years people would yawn. If I buy a domain that clearly will bring in the equiv. value and then continue beyond what I would spend for so much traffic people think I am creating hype. If this is your belief then you are missing the point.
Make me out as a bad guy if you will but this was a great purchase and will lead to one of the best sites for wikis on the Web.
I truly wish you all the very best.
Cheers,
John Gotts
More I think about it, I think wiki is diferrent from other new pale startups entering into crowded space with duplicate services.
Currently only open sources and few other have popular wikis.Many people like me do not have any personal wikis,or business wikis, except that we do read wikipedia,wikinews etc.,.
I think The need of having personal wiki is somewhere between email and a personal website.Everybody has email and very few have peronal websites. But many may need personal/group wikis for diferrent collaberate tasks .Currently there are no popular usecases from private sector, like people saying ,we are doing this task and without wiki we could not have done it.
Nobody thought YouTube would be used the exact way it is being used today.Similarly wiki is preparing platform and who knows community may slowly figure out better uses of wikis and everybody or every group may have a wiki in future. If I need a wiki, I would go with wiki.com as it is easy to remember and lot easier, compared to having my own website. As more and more websites are showing up, definately wiki name value will only increase.
You never know and I think what John is trying to do is reseerving the spot, in case if it makes big. Worst case, he can still sell it for good price any day and somebody else with better Idea will buy it.
This 3 mln investment is essensially an investment into MindTouch and it’s marketing campaign. In such perspective, this investment looks pretty trendy and in touch with 3 to 5 mln investments into less attractive start-ups in their 1st or 2nd rounds.
Cheers, Denis.
I wish the best of luck to Wiki.com.
However, I have several MediaWiki wikis, and while these Wiki.com subdomain wikis may, in fact, be wikis, they are what I call “kindergarten versions” of a true wiki.
I’d like to offer Wiki.com some friendly advice.
I think your idea about offering wikis to the general public is a stroke of genius, but it is my humble opinion that you need to offer real MediaWiki wikis to the public, not these admittedly “kindergarten versions” of a real wiki. There are many fine people out there who know exactly what a wiki is, and they will not be fooled. I sure know I don’t want a “kindergarten version” wiki, hell I want the Real McCoy. I need to be able to change my password LOL and to be able to set up categories and portals. Have you ever heard of NAMESPACES LOL????!!!!!
These things require expertise, a dedicated staff and a tremendous amount of capital. Nothing great ever comes free or at a low cost. You look to be great and come off as a genius, you gotta have the tech knowledge and work extremely hard to pull it off. Hope you enjoy 18 hour days 7 days a week.
Peace.
Google may only track four hundred thousand results from blog.com, but tracks millions from blogger.com. With Blogger.com mentioned much more often than Blog.com as being influential in the ground-level blog market, why mention Blog.com’s numbers?
MindTouch DekiWiki is what powers Wiki.com’s DekiFarm. MindTouch DekiWiki is an interoperable (stores in XHTML) MediaWiki fork that includes a rich text (WYSIWYG) editor, hierarchies, page level permissions, clean interface, file attachment and indexing, image galleries, and more. It is highly highly extensible and scalable. More information can be found at: http://www.OpenGarden.org on DekiWiki and Dream.
To Alex Foley: I think you are missing the point on the names here. Blog.com was used as an example of what a popular domain term might be valued at. Blogger is a blog platform. If people are looking for a wiki they would naturally go to wiki.com, not wikier.com. This was the whole point as the argument was that wiki.com was so valuable that everyone would go and sign up, is everyone going to blog.com to start a blog? It doesnt look that way according to Google’s site index.
If the reported traffic of 100K hits a
day is true then this could well be a
genuine sale.
100k hits per day??
I am shocked..
I seriously doubt that 100k / day claim as “natural type-in” traffic … it seems a lot of traffic domains are actually pointed at wiki.com.
I enjoy your site very much! THANK YOUs
Your site is very interesting and usefulh
Lucky to find you, keep on the good workk guys! Best of luck.2
Thank for making this valuable information available to the public.y
A fantastic site, and brilliant effort. A great piece of work.+
I like your base.
Your base is nice.
Anyone been to http://www.wiki.com lately? There is nothing there. I looked at the Google cache of the main page and saw this:
____________
“We are in the process of making some great changes to the site and will be live again, Monday, December 18th.
The Wiki.com Team”
____________
Hmmm…. Today is Wed, Dec 20th, which does not bode well for Wiki.com. If I were the company that struck a deal with John Gotts for the wiki.com domain, I would be very worried about him defaulting on the $2.8 Million.
Update:
Now, http://www.wiki.com forwards to http://www.wikia.com. At this point, I would say that John Gotts has officially defaulted on the domain, and that ownership of it has been transferred back to Dynamo.com.
And I was so looking forward to running “vaporware.wiki.com!”
-Dave
Wiki.com now looks to be dead.
If you go to wik.is however it says “the new wiki.com. powered by mindtouch.
It looks like after Gotts dropped MindTouch they waited for him to miss a payment then did a deal on the domain themselves.
Where wikia.com fits in I am not sure, but what is clear is that Gotts does not control the domain and the $3 million deal was a total flop.
wiki.com seems to be dead. can anyone please inform when it will be live again, I have a wiki site there which i need to run
Good luck in finding wiki.com or any other website supposedly owned by Gotts — look to lawsuit filed in Klickitat County Washington.