commercialization of wikis

Commercialization of Wikis:
Open Community that Pays the Bills

Evan Prodromou
Founder, Wikitravel10 March 2007South by Southwest Interactive

Overview

Introduction to commercial wikis

Wiki business models

Rules for commercial wikis

I'm going to talk about three parts of wikis and commercialization.

First, I'm going to give an overview of wikis, their commercializability, issues with commercialization, and alternatives to commercialization.

Second, I'm going to go over some wiki business models and potential revenue sources.

Finally, I'm going to cover some important rules for nurturing a healthy wiki community and content repository.

What is a wiki?

An information repository

Open for everyone to edit

Collaborate on the same work

Easiest possible editing

Web browser interface (almost always)

Free/Open Content (majority)

Ward Cunningham called the original wiki the simplest database that could possibly work. Today, when we think of wikis, we think of Wikipedia and the MediaWiki engine. I think there are some other projects, like Librivox, that have Wiki nature.

I've rephrased some of Ward's original definition for what makes a wiki a wiki. A wiki is an information repository that is open for everyone to edit, and everyone collaborates on the same work. It lowers barriers of security (open editing) and technology (simple markup). All current wikis use a Web browser interface, and many (maybe most) current wikis are used principally for creating Free or Open Content.

Does commerce belong in wikis?

Part of a healthy ecology of the wikisphere: personal, commercial, and non-profit

Frees up public-sector resources

It's OK for a company to do the right thing

Some people have a knee-jerk reaction against any commercialism or corporate involvement in Open Content or Internet projects.

We can borrow a model from the Web at large, and from Open Source software development. A healthy ecology of public/private/personal projects is important.

Each wiki project that can support itself financially makes a smaller pool of projects that needs donations.

Companies getting involved in Free Content, communities, self-organization is a good thing.

Other ways to support a wiki project

Out of pocket

With donations, grants, government funds

Move to a wiki farm

Many wiki projects can be paid for out-of-pocket by the founders. With cheap web hosting and careful management, you can run a pretty high-traffic wiki on less than US$100/month.

It's also possible to solicit donations from participants, get grants, or get government funds to keep the wiki going. There are a lot of programs out there for making cool information projects.

Finally, it's possible to move to a commercial or non-commercial wiki farm or large wiki project like Wikia, the Wikimedia Foundation, or something similar. This shifts the responsibility but also the decision-making power.

Bottom line

Do whatever works for you.

Four kinds of wiki business

Service provider
(Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki)

Content hosting
(wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia)

Consulting
(SocialText)

Content development
(WikiBiz)

Wiki service providers make wiki software available over the Web, either for a fee to the founder, or for free, plus advertising.

Wiki service providers are typically technology- and feature-oriented; they're less able to help with goals, community organization, editorial and formatting, or other soft skills.

In a way, these kinds of wiki businesses are more like other service providers (photo- and video-sharing, blogging) than they are like other wiki companies.


Service provider

Content hosting

Consulting
(SocialText)

Content development
(WikiBiz)

There's a second class of site I call content hosting or community hosting businesses. They're businesses that choose a particular topic or issue and focus on creating the best community and content repository around that topic.

This is really the professionalization of the wiki founder and wiki administrator role. The value added by the company is in providing bandwidth, storage space, software specializations and system maintenance.

The company stays much closer to the community because it's focused on the topic.

I'm going to concentrate more on this business type later.


Service provider

Content hosting

Consulting
(SocialText)

Content development
(WikiBiz)

An interesting play has been by SocialText, which has built a business out of wiki consulting. ST does software development, but they also do consulting to help enterprises use wiki.

They've been very good at communicating not only wiki technology but wiki culture.


Service provider

Content hosting

Consulting
(SocialText)

Content development
(WikiBiz)

Finally, one of the more interesting business models for wikis has been content development. WikiBiz is a company that offered a unique service to its clients: in exchange for a fee, it would create complete, well-researched Wikipedia pages about that client.

One of the key things that this business provided was not so much editorial or research, but being connected to the Wikipedia community and familiar with its rules and social norms. WikiBiz wouldn't guarantee that the article would remain as written.

WikiBiz was eventually banned from Wikipedia, but I anticipate a lot of growth in this kind of service as wikis become more central in the Internet.

Crowdsourcing

You.

Sucker

Sucker

Sucker

Sucker

Sucker

Sucker

Sucker

The crowdsourcing business model is extremely simple.

You set up a system to get a bunch of dingbats and rubes to do lots of work for you.

Then, you sell the stuff they make to other rubes and suckers and knuckledraggers, maybe even the same ones.

You get famous and make lots of money. All through the power of the Internet.

Eff that.

I think that crowdsourcing may be one of the ugliest terms yet invented for the Internet, and God knows we've had a few.

This mindframe takes an incredibly altruistic, idealistic and humanitarian process and cheapens it into a rigged carnival game.

People are not stupid. They aren't suckers. They aren't going to work for you for free, and they aren't going to make you rich and famous for free.

But, if you are lucky, and if you show that you deserve their trust, they may let you be the steward for their community and their creations.

A platform for knowledge

You.

Havers

Needers

Knowledge

A more reasonable and sustainable model for commercial wikis is that of a platform for knowledge sharing.

Here, you provide the infrastructure, guidance, vision and focus to help knowledge-havers collaborate to share knowledge with knowledge-needers.

In this framework, nobody is giving anything to you. They are using you to get to a goal of their own. You are helping them do something noble and decent. Nobody is getting exploited in this scenario.

Rules for commercial wikis

Have a noble purpose.

Demonstrate value.

Be transparent.

Extract value where you provide value.

Set boundaries.

Be personally involved.

Run with the right crowd.

Again, I'm concentrating mostly on content hosting businesses, because they're the ones I'm most familiar with and I think the most interesting that are out there.

These are some rules or tips for running a commercial content hosting wiki. A lot of them are going to apply both to other social software businesses and to public/personal wikis.

I. Have a Noble Purpose.

It's absolutely critical for a wiki business to have a noble purpose an overriding mission that is ambitious and captures the imagination.

For any wiki this is important, but for commercial wikis it's even more important, since you have to offset the image of crowdsourcing. One purpose is going to be make me money; you have to offset that with another purpose that has value to your contributors.

Value for the contributor

Blog

Photo
Video

Wiki

= Ego

= Friends

= Purpose

What value you provide to the individual contributor as a wiki company is much different than what other social software companies provide. Your value proposition is much less that your providing free services or whatever. Your value is mostly to the group or community.

Ego = identity, fame, fortuneFriends = community, social interaction, making real connectionsPurpose = mission, nobility, meaning

The Noble Purpose.

Probably the most essential service that wikis can provide is creation of an Open Content content base. Using an Open Content license like Creative Commons's most liberal licenses (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike), and meaning it, is the best way to capture your community's imagination with a noble purpose.

As a side note: avoid the selfish licenses like the NonCommercial ones. Learn to share.

Are there other noble purposes? Possibly. Post-Katrina wikis that listed names and locations of survivors. Not commercial, though.

II. Demonstrate Value.

Your contributors and your community can find another platform at any time. You need to demonstrate your value to the project in order to justify extracting commercial value from the project.

Your major competitor is not some other company; it's a wiki farm, or a community project on the same project. If you can't demonstrate some value higher than just setting up an Open Source wiki program, you've got a problem.

Ways to add value

software development

systems administration (big wikis)

community management

external promotion

carry the torch

There are a lot of ways to demonstrate value to the community. Developing software that's customized to the problem space of your current users is crucial.

In addition, keeping a huge site running is a great value.

Community management communicating the Wiki way to participants is a huge value. Wikia does this really well.

External promotion of the project advertisement, linking, etc gives huge value.

Wiki communities are transient (turn over every 1-2 months); being the heart and soul of the project is huge value.

III. Be Transparent.

Contributors will be watching for any kind of duplicity, unsavoriness, or hidden agenda. Even the appearance of sleaziness or secretiveness in your company is going to lose you the passion of the community.

As often as possible, use transparent procedures. Have an open bug database. Use forums or the wiki itself for feedback and discussion. Public technical policy.

IV. Extract value where you provide value.

By far the main source of revenue for commercial wikis today is through Web advertising. It's a simple system that is extremely transparent and, in many ways, very fair.

A second source of revenue for content hosting wikis is selling physical media like printed books. Because the company (usually) controls any trademarks, and has easy access to the whole corpus of work, they're uniquely positioned to provide this kind of product. In addition, it's clearly an advantage to the community, and makes it clear what your selling (the paper, not the words).

Avoid like the plague trying to extract value from your user database. These are your collaborators, not your audience.

V. Set Boundaries.

You need to show openness, show transparency, encourage participation and partnership with community.

But it's also important to set boundaries. We set our boundaries around hardware, software development, platforms, business development, staff. There's a boundary about what's a consensus decision and what's off-limits.

Similarly, we have limits as to what we decide autocratically. Namely, editorial policy, guidelines, community policies, are all for discussion by the community. As part of the community, we have a say, but it's not absolute.

VI. Be Personally Involved.

Have a name. Use your real name on the site. Have a user page, describe yourself, have a picture. This should apply to everybody in the company, to the extent possible.

Do the grunt work. Welcome new users, participate in policy discussions, read recent changes (or equivalent).

Have friends, know people by name. Be genuine and show your passion for the project and for the topic.

VII. Run with the right crowd.

Just like in real life, you get judged by who you run with. Your company should make friends with and collaborate with the right kind of companies: open content, open wikis.Contribute to Open Source projects.Go to conferences. Most wiki conferences today are really small. RecentChangesCamp, RoCoCo are unconferences where you can meet everyone. Be on MeatBall, be on CommunityWiki, be on WikiIndex.Use links. Fellow travellers on Wikitravel.Use wikis. Become a Wikipedia admin. Be part of other sites.

Conclusions

Commercial wikis can be healthy additions to the Internet and to Free/Open Content.

Community, content and commercialism need to be carefully managed.

It's a fun time to be involved with wikis.

Thanks

Michele Jenkins, Wikitravel

Jack Herrick, wikiHow

CommunityWiki and MeatBall communities

Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales, Wikia

The readers and contributors of Wikitravel

Questions...?

http://evan.prodromou.name/Talks/SXSW07

commercialization of wikis

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