John Gotts, the entrepreneur who agreed to pay $3 million for the domain name Wiki.com and reportedly told people he was “going to kill Wikipedia” may have thrown in the towel after just a few months. Instead of launching the promised Wiki site with MindTouch software, the Wiki.com site now simply redirects to Wikia, another wiki service affiliated with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
When asked for a comment, Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said only that Wikia does not currently own the domain name, and wouldn’t speculate on whether or not a deal was closed with Gotts. The original deal that Gotts did to acquire the domain required $10,000 monthly payments to the original owner, with the bulk of the payment to be made down the road. Perhaps Wikia is just covering those monthly payments for Gotts, while his lawyer tries to find a way out of the original contract. We’ll see.
Update: The Whois information for the domain name is still showing Dynamo, the entity that supposedly sold it to Gotts.