14 DAY TRIAL // Wikia, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s for-profit initiative that allows users to create their own wikis on any subject matter they fancy, has been seeing strong growth in the last six months and is now profitable. In the past year, user numbers have more than doubled, going from 2.8 million unique visitors in July, 2008 to 6.5 million in the same month this year, in the US alone, according to comScore numbers, and reaching 14.2 million visitors worldwide.
What's ironic is that all this growth mostly came just after Wales left the company in March. Still, the site proves that wikis and crowdsourced content in general can be made into viable businesses, even though Wikia isn't actually profitable in a strict GAAP sense, but in that the revenue from the ads it serves on the site is “significantly higher” than the cost of operations at the moment, according to the company's CEO, Gil Penchina.
The drive behind the growth is a number of very popular wikis on specific subjects, mostly catered toward fans of popular movie franchises or video games, with some of the most popular being the Star Wars-themed Wookieepedia, the Harry Potter Wiki or the Twilight Saga Wiki. One of the biggest hits, both in popularity but also financially, is the World of Warcraft WoWWiki, which is one of the best online resources for the game and that convinced Blizzard, the game's maker, to lay down some heavy advertising money. But it's not just about the big names, the site has wikis on over 50,000 subjects.
“Seeing audience numbers increase confirms that communities on Wikia are creating the most compelling content on every topic under the sun,” Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, said. “Brand marketers also see value in these broad and committed fan bases, so we've created a flexible platform to allow both wiki communities and premium brands to engage with each other in ways that are mutually beneficial. Our mantra is to support Wikia's communities to build traditional media that they love and which audiences are loyal to, while engaging marketers to provide useful and compelling information that targets our content and will be welcomed by the community.”