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Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting

Posted by Zonk on from the hosting-for-nothing-and-your-wiki-for-free dept.

eldavojohn writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is going to be giving away free web hosting from his company's site Wikia. The company announced this 'free culture' movement at the current Le Web 3 conference in Paris. They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and individual investors with no business model. Is this a dotcom bubble style mistake or just proof of Jimmy Wales' golden touch?" From the article: "Openserving will go further than Wikia's current services, by giving away hosting services and bandwidth, in addition to allowing site creators to keep the advertising revenue generated by the site. 'If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? Well, I don't know yet,' Penchina said. The software acquired with ArmchairGM will let Openserving customers create collaborative publishing sites, combining elements of blogs and wikis."

2 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Business Model? by space+tyrant+xenu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Buyer beware is all I can say about investing in a project that doesn't have a clear direction for recouping the initial investment. They have an idea of what they want to do, and it seems like a worthy idea to me, but I'm not sure why companies would want to invest in a project where there's uncertainty like this in getting a return. It seems like this would be a better idea for individuals to support, like a foundation, rather than as a business venture.

  2. Only for free content... by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They only host wikis for free if the content of the wiki is also under a free license.

    An obvious business plan would be to charge people who want to use the Wikia for hosting non-free content. This has parallels in the free software world, where Troll Tech give away Qt for use by free software, but charge people who want to use Qt for non-free software. Cygnus did the same with Cygwin, and Alladin probably pioneered the business model with GhostScript.

    The free wikis will in this scenario work as a combined advertisement and proof-of-concept for the paying customers.