Hmm, very interesting . . .

When that press release was first posted, it said:

"Wikia will take 100 per cent of the advertising revenue from the sites they build."

Now it says Jimmy Wales is constructing a Death Star in Earth's orbit.

They need to lock that PR pending editorial revue.

much respect to the Wiki world. But more structure and services will be required to convince publishers and content producers to look more deeply into that.

Their basic idea is certainly very interesting.

Now that's a flawed business model:

1) Pay all operational costs in order to get user-generated content
2) Have the user generated content link to www.wikia.com
3) Wikia.com itself is built with free content from users
4) Get the revenues from the ads on Wikia.com but not from the ads in step (1)

Sounds like a giant scheme to establish a legit link-farm.

And also, why don't the people that contribute for free to Wikia.com start doing it instead on Openserving and keep all their ad revenue for them selves.

Regardless, its all built on AdSense for now, and that's not a viable longterm business plan.

And this is really not clear:

Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the not-for-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers - bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular websites - 100 per cent of advertising revenue from the sites they build.

Sounds like Wikia is betting the farm on SEO. Wikia's free hosting service will keep Wikia's wiki communities powered with one way organic inbounds.

My guess is that Jimmy Wales has seen how Wikipedia is carried by its SERPS dominance, and is trying to replicate that inbound link love for a for-profit site. $5M in funding from Amazon should pay for a nice chunk of hosting...

One problem with the wiki model is that, because it's collaborative, with different people contributing different edits and chunks of text, it's almost impossible to structure a revenue sharing program for contributors. This could be a flaw in the long term sustainability of commercial, wiki powered communities.

That's a good point, lorenzinho2. Any given wiki page is likely a collaborative effort that has seen both major and minor edits by multiple users. I suppose one could determine who was the author of different parts of the page on a word-count basis, but that would be REALLY complicated and confusing.

I think Wiki is hoping it will be bought by Yahoo or Google.. and why not - it is dominating the serps anyway!

I think Wiki is hoping it will be bought by Yahoo or Google.. and why not - it is dominating the serps anyway!

Google probably can push just one button to exclude Wikipedia from the index and tank its valuation.