Wikia, a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company’s revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn’t yet reached true profitability.
He won’t disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page).
Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 380 million page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say.
The site makes money on ads surrounding content. They have a direct sales team and also pull ads from networks and Google.
Their largest site is lyrics.wikia.com, with over a million lyrics pages. answers.wikia.com, which launched a year ago, has 600,000 user generated questions and a million monthly visitors. A couple of months later the company ended its attempt to build a search engine that could challenge Google.
The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.
Isn’t the whole lyrics thing illegal? A lyrics site gets shut down everyday.
They have a licensing deal with Gracenote (see lyrics.wikia.com/LyricWiki:Copyrights ).
Sadly this means they had to shut down the API lyric feed, which was previously used by numerous apps.
But on the good side, it means that people can contribute to the project without being afraid that their work’s going to disappear next time RIAA flexes its muscles. And Wikia’s ads are far less obnoxious than the confetti of cheap ads/popups/ringtones you deal with on most lyrics sites.
It takes time to build a site and make money, finally wikia proved out to be a positive project!
Wikia is the most annoying implementation of wiki so far. “You are now leaving Wikia. Are you sure?! PRETTY PLEASE MAKE AN ACCOUNT”
That’s great news, I hope they will be releasing the numbers in the future, I’m curious to know what they mean with profitability: hey we are cash flow positive and gain more than we spend a month or more of hey we could pay those $ 14 M back and stay just full profit now, everybody enjoying a profit on his share. Not really sure what they mean with profitability here.
Wow, thats really interesting and I didn’t know about the search engine.
Congrats to Wikia. Gil Penchina is certainly one very smart guy.
The question is, how they are going to compete with Google’s search?
Now search.wikia.com redirects me to answers.wikia.com.
Read the article, it says it *ended* search.wikia.com
Wikia is just a GeoCities with better content. It’s a web host – it won’t set the world aflame like Wikipedia did.
Just take some text ads on Wikipedia, and you’ll see Mediawiki development skyrocket – you’d have had WYSIWYG editing years ago.
As someone who visits a few large sites on Wikia…took them long enough. There are tons of half-done sites on there.
“Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views.”
Wow, over 100 pages per user…thats huge
Yes, that *is* huge. Also known as “a fib”.
They sure need to fill in the Visual designer and UX openings filled!
The layout/color schemes of the internal pages suck big time!
I use Wikia’s gaming Wikis all the time; they are, by default, the best place to get substantive information on new games.
Wikia has contracts with main music developers, so it’s legal.
My experience with Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina is as follows:
As recently as January 2008, Wikia hosted online a web menagerie of freely-licensed images of innocent children juxtaposed with depraved images of children being mercilessly spanked until purple, along with photos of various sexual-enhancement toys. I led an urgent campaign that challenged this “Spanking Art” Wikia wiki. Wales became quite ruffled under the collar, irritated that I had not “made a complaint through the proper channels”. Imagine, sexually-charged images of deviant abuse against children, and the man hosting it on his company’s servers was more upset that the complaints against his site weren’t filed properly.
Furthermore, in January 2009, Wikia magically began renting office space out to the purportedly non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, even though Wales played a founding role in both corporations, and continues to act in both entities’ governance process. We were publicly led to believe by the WMF that the rental bidding process was completely above board, but I have an e-mail from Gil Penchina that says the WMF approached Wikia and asked if they could rent space on a temporary basis. Penchina was concerned about getting accused of stealing from a non-profit by charging too much, so Wikia ended up asking the Wikimedia Foundation to get competing quotes from other landlords so that the WMF “could feel comfortable with the decision”.
In my 20-year career in business, I’ve seen a few wired self-deals transpire before. This deal between Wikia and the WMF strikes me as another one. It is actually surprising to me that the IRS has not opened an investigation of the unethical business practices that have transpired at and between Wikia and the WMF.
Nonetheless, the ability of the typical Wikia/Wikipedia user (often a pimply-faced teenager) to discern financial shenanigans is next to nil. So, we keep hearing these laudatory media turd-polishing stories that make the warped Wiki world look shiny and pious.
Here’s a question — where is the street address of the Wikia, Inc. headquarters? Serious question. I challenge you to find it anywhere on any Wikia website. Why are they hiding their whereabouts?
I see the story has been quietly corrected to read “380 million” page views in December. I suspect that yields about $150,000 in monthly revenue, while the company probably costs about $125,000 per month to run. All on a $14 million investment. Only 46 more years to break-even, at this rate!