Wikia Raises $4 Million

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.