Do they really expect us to believe that they're getting 128.57 page views per visitor? Facebook ad Youtube each get about 15 page views per visitor; Flickr gets about 9; and Wikipedia gets about 4-5 page views per visitor. But we're supposed to believe that Wikia somehow beats the industry leaders in views-per-visitor by a margin of over eightfold?

Frankly, my experience with both Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina and their management of Wikia is similar to William's, above. 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, all on the same Wikia site. 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.

Penchina's role in the January 2009 deal between the purportedly non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia, Inc. (for office rental space) is also fishy. The WMF claimed that they solicited competitive bids from different landlords, but Penchina told me that the WMF approached Wikia and asked if Wikia could rent space on a temporary basis. Penchina didn't want to be accused of stealing from a non-profit by charging too much, so he says that Wikia ended up asking the WMF to get some competing quotes from other landlords so that the WMF could feel "comfortable with the decision".

I've seen a few wired self-deals before in my 20-year career in business. I detect that this was one of them. It's really amazing that the visible lack of business ethics at both Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation have not drawn both into a federal tax investigation.

Lucian, you will notice that TechCrunch has corrected its story, thanks to my investigative tip. The actual page views for Wikia are in the range of 380 million per month -- seven times fewer than originally reported. I estimate that this draws about $150,000 per month in revenue for the company, which likely costs about $125,000 a month to operate. So, $25,000 per month in profits -- on a $14,000,000 investment. Only 46 more years to go before break-even.