Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting

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."

Comments

Not webhosting, wiki hosting

[suso]

Well I guess its not automated account generation, I signed up 30 minutes ago and still haven't received welcome info.

Re:Not webhosting, wiki hosting

[DragonWriter]

Their front page says "Openserving will go live shortly" which suggest it isn't live yet. When I've seen systems that accepted sign-ups before they were live in the past, its been a pretty mixed bag of systems that would provide a normal automated welcome response but you couldn't access the service till it was live, sites that would provide a "we got your registration and will process it when we are ready to accept users" response, and sites that didn't respond at all until they were live.

Obligatory underpants gnomes quote

[elrous0]

'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.

Isn't this the real-life equivalent of the underpants gnome line?

1. Give away bandwidth and the storage
2. ??
3. Profit!

Maybe he's been reading too much /.

-Eric

Easy Answer

[Goody]

'If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? '

They will make it up in volume!

Come on it's obvious

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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?

Free web hosting? Jimmy Wales? dubious investors? That's *got* to be something to do with pr0n...

Business Model?

[space tyrant xenu]

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.

This sounds

[JustNiz]

like its a gift to net-abusers like spammers, child porners, etc.
I hope they make sure that they get good ID of everyone who hosts stuff on their service and don't have some loophole where people can set up accounts with anonymous/fake ID.

Question

[wile_e_wonka]

How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages? And how does the 100% ad revenue thing work if you use Adsense?

Re:Question

[DragonWriter]

How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages?

The details of its features advertised by openserving.com are different than either of those; its seems to me broadly similar to blogspot, though.

"Free Culture"

[NineNine]

"Open source was the beginning. Free culture is what's happening next," Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said Monday, announcing the company's plans at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris on the future of social media.

Sorry to burst your bubble Gil, but here goes: Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?

Re:"Free Culture"

[elrous0]

Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?

It won't matter, because in the "free culture" we'll all be so goddamn smug that our shit won't stink.

-Eric

Loads of Problems

[WebHostingGuy]

I admit I am biased since I an in this industry but are they smoking something?

The only places which have offered free hosting have relied on ad revenue to make back the costs. What do they think is going to happen when the warez people hit the site? There goes the bandwidth, the storage and here come the problems. And what about the spammers who will flock to the free site to run the smtp mailers? They are going to spend so much time on fighting off this sort of crap from the legitimate people they won't have time for anything else. And apparently they are going to do this for free?

Hi there,

[captnitro]

Hi there, people reading this article ten years in the future.

If Openserving was a giant success, then I am all for it. The commoditization of culture and expression is the future, and I should be noted as before my time. Find me in the present, give me gifts. We'll go do expression stuff together or something. You can cry into my neuroblog and listen to emo with me.

If Openserving was a huge flameout that eventually meant the end of the company for yanno, giving away things that take resources for free, then I am rightly skeptical and predict this as a stupid move that will waste lots of money and time. Find me in the present and we'll go to a brick-and-mortar store where you can purchase me a neuroblog. I don't know what that is yet, but it sounds exciting.

Only for free content...

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:Only for free content...

[kebes]

Very good point.

I'd also add that perhaps they are not trying to "give away hosting" for a bunch of independant little pages, but are trying to create a community. If you look at their demo (which is limited right now), it looks like they will be encouraging all the users to use a sort of "standard" wiki engine for all the content. I think the idea is to encourage people to generate content in a structured way.

Once done, the openserving top-page (or some other domain) can act as a neat aggregate of all of this, a portal to the various pages/projects. Perhaps this top-level page will have ads and this ad revenue is part of the business model. (Granted they make less money than if they take a cut of all ad revenue, but by letting users keep the ad-revenue for the sub-pages, they attract more users.)

I think there are many ways that this can generate money, but most people always think in terms of "making the most money" instead of "making a reasonable amount of profit." (See story about Craigslist currently on slashdot front page, for instance.)

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I think there is a business model. Just because he is publically saying "I don't know yet" doesn't mean he doesn't have one (or probably several) ideas about how to make money. And the investors are probably thinking similarly.

That's so Web 1.0

[Animats]

Remember all those free hosting services? Where are they now?

Besides, web hosting is so cheap today. For under $10/month, you can have a full web site on a good commercial hosting service. You can use CGI, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL, and AJAX. You get a gigabyte of disk space and no limit on traffic.

Further down the food chain, there's 50megs.com, at $2.00/month. Free if you're willing to accept ads. Less space and fewer features.

If you don't want the bother of running a web site, there's Myspace and its clones. Geocities is still around, although now owned by Yahoo.

If you want to store public domain material of lasting value that others might someday need, you can get a free Internet Archive account and upload it there. They have petabytes of disk space. If you have software source, there's SourceForge.

So who needs another free hosting service?

Re:WTF are the VCs thinking?

[TrueKonrads]

I think VCs think along the lines: "4 mil is peanuts, and if this guy can make wikipedia - something every other schoolkid uses for homework, he probably can stumble upon something that can be monetized. So, we know that it is high risk, but it could be high profit too."
Anyway, for some vc's 4 mil is what their Yacht costs in maintenance ( year) .

The Catch...

[JD-1027]

Anyone can modify your website.

My take on it

[Kadin2048]

I don't have any idea where they think they're going to make money -- I wouldn't be forking over my dough to this guy and expecting any of it back, but then again I'm not a venture capitalist. I do think I understand a little more of what the site is about, though.

It's more than just "free web space," a la GeoCities. It's basically a prebuilt dynamic web site. You can take a look at one example here. It's sort of like a miniature Digg. The site creator and its users write the stories, like a blog, and can then vote on them and comment.

I think the key is that the content of the sites is under the GFDL, in order to qualify for the free hosting. At least I think this is the case, because the site goes on and on about "free software and content". I think that's where Wales' master plan comes in; it's a way of encouraging people to create more free content. One assumes that if this really takes off, they'll charge for hosting of non-free materials. But in the short term, it might greatly build the amount of content that's available under a free license, and which can be incorporated into other projects, like Wikipedia and the Commons.

Really it looks a bit like Sourceforge, only for blog-ish sites rather than OSS software projects. They handle some of the site maintenance and backend work, and in return you get a free website...assuming you meet their standards. If you don't, then you can pay for hosting (theoretically, at some point in the future).

Wales is no fool

[vtcodger]

Based on his record, Jimmy Wales is no fool and I imagine that he has some plan in mind to eventually make money for his investors. His concept, whatever it may be may, or may not, be nefarious. It might be something as simple as someday tying optional money making ventures to a major, largely free of charge website. Which means creating the web site first.

In point of fact, Wales has done us -- all of us -- a major favor with the Wikipedia. He didn't have to. I'm inclined to cut Wales some slack on this. Let's see what the man is up to before we condemn him.