{"id":564,"date":"2006-10-30T11:47:48","date_gmt":"2006-10-30T18:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=564"},"modified":"2006-10-30T11:47:48","modified_gmt":"2006-10-30T18:47:48","slug":"larrying_wikipe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=564","title":{"rendered":"Larrying Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Wikipedia were a for-profit company, what would it be worth? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about – and, apparently, others have, too. HipMojo did some back-of-the-envelope calculations<\/a> last Thursday and came with $580 million as an estimated hypothetical valuation. That got Jason Calacanis drooling, and he upped HipMojo’s valuation by a factor of ten, writing<\/a> that the online encyclopedia would be worth a cool $5 billion.<\/p>\n

Calacanis\u2019s number is insane, but there\u2019s no doubt that, in today\u2019s market, a for-profit, ad-running Wikipedia would be worth a whole lot – and then some.<\/p>\n

Just consider the latest Comscore report<\/a> on the world’s top ten web sites. Wikipedia comes in at #6, having attracted 155 million unique visitors during the month of September. More striking still is that its traffic increased by a whopping 12% over August’s total – the same rate of increase posted by YouTube, the #14 site. But Wikipedia\u2019s growth is much more impressive than YouTube\u2019s because Wikipedia was starting from a much larger base – twice as large, in fact.<\/p>\n

Beyond its huge popularity, Wikipedia is by its nature a search-advertiser\u2019s dream. Visitors to the site, after all, are seeking information about particular topics, many of which – from diseases to porn stars – are also highly prized targets for search advertisers. (Compare Wikipedia to, say, a site like Digg, where users are not seeking out information on a particular topic, and individual pages present a hodge-podge of information that frustrates ad-placement algorithms.) If you do a Google search on a high-priced AdWords keyword like “asbestos,” Wikipedia comes up #3 and it’s the first nongovernmental result. It’s also #3 for “lasik,” #3 for “lawyer,” #3 for “Viagra,” #4 for “mesothelioma,” #6 for “poker,” and #2 for “sex.” And, of course, it’s #1 for hundreds of other terms, including “lawsuit” and “personal computer.”<\/p>\n

For a search company like Google, in other words, Wikipedia would almost certainly be the most valuable single property for displaying search ads on the entire internet (with the exception, of course, of its own search site). Because of Wikipedia’s increasing dominance over search results for common terms, moreover, its lack of ads turns it into a vast black hole for Google and other search-ad syndicators. It sucks in huge numbers of web surfers without spitting out any ad revenue whatsoever. It’s not hard to see, therefore, how valuable a property it would become if it began to run ads.<\/p>\n

I trust the Wikipedians will defend the company’s nonprofit status, and I hope they resist Calacanis\u2019s fatuous suggestion that it’s “unconscionable to not monetize the Wikipedia” by sticking ads on the site and giving the money to charity. By that logic, you’d put billboards along the sides of the Grand Canyon – and on Calacanis’s forehead. There’s nothing immoral about choosing not to commercialize something.<\/p>\n

But the huge theoretical value of Wikipedia\u2019s site does makes me wonder why no devious entrepreneurs have made a concerted effort to take Wikipedia’s content, which is of course free to be reused in any way, and reformat and rebrand it as an attractive commercial site. Why, in other words, hasn\u2019t anyone done to Wikipedia what Larry Ellison last week did<\/a> to RedHat?<\/p>\n

It’s not like Wikipedia’s site is perfect. The design’s mediocre, the user interface is often confusing, and the search tool is just plain awful. While it\u2019s true that some sites, like Answers.com, already syndicate Wikipedia’s content, they mix it up with a whole bunch of other stuff and don’t really add any value beyond the existing Wikipedia site. I have to believe that a couple of talented coders could pretty easily hack together an improved version of Wikipedia, with a better design, a better interface, and a much better search engine. They could also strip out the site\u2019s endless supply of arcana – the history and talk pages, for instance, and all those “warning” boxes – which are beloved by the Wikipedians but are just distracting screen junk for pretty much everyone else on earth. That would simplify the site and also reduce storage costs. Then, once the site was up, you’d advertise the hell out of it, positioning it as a superior version of the free encyclopedia.<\/p>\n

Even if you siphoned off just a fraction of Wikipedia\u2019s traffic, it would still be a pretty darn lucrative site – and, if it really was easier to use than Wikipedia, the traffic would tend to grow naturally. Now, granted, such a move would be a pretty slimy thing to do – and would no doubt earn the entrepreneurs some really bad karma. But, hey, it’s not like the market’s invisible hand is known for the gentleness of its caress. So tell me: What am I missing? Why hasn\u2019t anyone made a real effort to do a Larry on Wikipedia?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Wikipedia were a for-profit company, what would it be worth? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about – and, apparently, others have, too. HipMojo did some back-of-the-envelope calculations last Thursday and came with $580 million as an estimated hypothetical valuation. That got Jason Calacanis drooling, and he upped HipMojo’s valuation by a factor of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}