How free blogs could lead to free money
Most bloggers face a stark financial choice: Give up advertising revenues to a free hosting provider, or pay for bandwidth in hopes of hitting the ad-sales jackpot. But one company now promises to let site operators keep their money and make some, too.
Wikia Inc., corporate cousin of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation best known for its user-written Wikipedia, unveiled the potentially disruptive OpenServing project Dec. 11 at Paris blogging conference Le Web 3.
Bloggers who sign up at OpenServing.com receive free bandwidth, storage and software — plus 100 percent of ad payments generated by their sites. The service will “allow people to create news, opinion and communities on any topic they want,” Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said at the conference.
All bloggers have to do in return is provide links back to Wikia Inc. pages on related subjects. The resulting traffic presumably will goose the company’s ad revenues.
But even with a glut of cheap bandwidth and server space, it’s unlikely back links alone would enable Wikia to profit from what Penchina envisions as “the world’s largest gatherer of free content.”
Underscoring the project’s uncertain financial prospects, he asked, “What’s the business model?” He elicited chuckles with his answer: “I don’t know yet, but we think it would be fun to figure it out.”
Penchina’s mention of donations and T-shirt sales as potential revenue streams didn’t sway the online commentators who weighed in on OpenServing last week. Visions of the Pets.com sock puppet and other reminders of Web 1.0 hubris seemed to dance in their heads.
But Amazon.com invested an undisclosed amount in Wikia Dec. 4, and several venture-capital firms and angel investors chipped in $4 million earlier this year. With smart money betting on Wikia’s user-generated content initiatives, I e-mailed co-founder Angela Beesley for further insights.
Google recently won a four-year contract to provide search advertising to MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites by guaranteeing News Corp. payments of at least $900 million over the life of the deal. It’s easy to imagine Google or Yahoo similarly paying Wikia several million dollars annually to become the exclusive ad provider for OpenServing. (The service will use Google AdSense to fill its inventory at launch.)
I also asked Beesley about the potential to sell consulting services to OpenServing bloggers — and/or charge subscription fees to site operators who use the service under their own URLs.
“We’re aware of a number of possibilities, including those,” she replied. “But we’ve not made any decisions on this yet. Right now, we’re really just testing the idea and relying on the wisdom of the community to see where it goes.”
The first OpenServing sites should go live in the next week or so. “I don’t yet know which topics we’re going to launch first,” Beesley wrote, “though sports would be a good candidate since we already have the popular sports wiki/blog/voting site ArmchairGM, which is running one version of the OpenServing software at armchairgm.com.” Meanwhile, visitors can launch a demo of the service at OpenServing.com.
If Google or Yahoo prove willing to effectively cut their advertising commissions by paying for exclusive access to OpenServing’s virtual real estate, both Wikia and its user community stand to profit. How’s that for a business model?
Guilty pleasure
The Generator Blog, generatorblog.blogspot.com. This site rounds up goofy Web applications that generate mock newspaper headlines, silly band names, Disneyland sign messages and the like. Holiday-themed entries link to personalized snow globes, an application that enables you to “elf yourself” by uploading a picture onto the body of a wee Santa’s helper and a Holiday Party Excuse Generator that spits out phrases such as, “Once the holidays are past, I hope to leave you a voicemail.” That’s the spirit.