Enough with the paid wikis already
I thought this whole thing had run its course with the Million Euro Wiki, but it appears I was mistaken. I hope Alex Tew realizes what he did when he started the Million Dollar Homepage. He started a fad, but the ideas are fast losing their shine as people try to emulate the success of the original. Here’s a thought: it can’t be done. There will never be another Million Dollar Homepage.
The latest ideas I’ve been told about (in a comment on this blog), are the Five dollar Wiki and the One Buck Wiki. In theory, I commend the idea of offering a page on a paid wiki for less than the $100 of the MDW and the MEW, but the original parody, Spamipedia, already offers pages for free. Actually, I don’t think the Internet can cope with any more wiki pages at all.
What we’re going to see is people with the exact same keywords on various different wikis competing against each other for traffic. I don’t believe that the pages of these wikis are ideal for generating organic traffic (many MDW aren’t even indexed in Google). The difference between the MEW and something like Spamipedia or the Five Dollar Wiki is who has been behind it and how much interest than generates by itself.
We could all start a wiki tomorrow and all put up pages targeting the same keywords, but what value do any of these pages have if nobody reads them? MDW and MEW sell pages and generate traffic because of strong backing from A-list bloggers.
Maybe some of these smaller, imitation imitation wikis will achieve a degree of success, but I’m not going to hold my breath just yet. Incidentally, the make money blogging page I set up on Spamipeda (that I have no idea how to edit now) has racked up 246 pages views, which would rank in the top 20 of MEW pages and the top 220 of MDW pages. Sadly, Spamipedia is living up to its name and most of the pages are now just spam.
Is there room for any more wikis in the world?
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8 Responses to “Enough with the paid wikis already”
Agreed. I got some spam comments on my blog today promoting the 5 dollar wiki. The original was a good idea.
I think part of Spampeida’s downfall honestly is that it IS free.
If you even charged 1 cent, then you’d filter out that SPAM, which I believe is the idea behind all these wikis. That no matter what happens, people will still keep buying pages and there will be no SPAM. Well…that’s my two cents…
Thanks for the plug though!
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Someone needs to set up a wiki that only tracks wikis. If that’s copied then we’d need a wiki that tracks wikis that track wikis.
Or people could realize that even the biggest of them all, Wikipedia, is garbage and we could get rid of all of ‘em.I’m going to see if the domain WikiTracker.com is taken.
Hmmm… that IS a good idea. How about WikiRati or WikiNoRati?
We also just launched http://OneBuckWiki.com where you can buy a page for a dollar with an exception that you can SELL your page down the road 10 times or more of its value.
At sale of every 1000 pages on the One Buck Wiki, a page will be sold at a higher dollar amount.
Price of one Page will follow the following schedule:
* 1000 Pages bought – a Page on the One Buck Wiki will be sold for $10
* 2000 Pages bought – a Page on the One Buck Wiki will be sold for $20
* 3000 Pages bought – a Page on the One Buck Wiki will be sold for $30
* 4000 Pages bought – a Page on the One Buck Wiki will be sold for $40
* 5000 Pages bought – a Page on the One Buck Wiki will be sold for $50
and so on…
We will have a press release very soon so check it out as we have just “launched” the website.
I own the domain 1dollarwiki.com, I’m probably not going to do anything with it if anyone is interested in purchasing it from me.
[...] more fun to be on the sidelines watching this unfold (along with John Lampard, Matt Jones and Angel ). The original MDW has an excellent, passionate marketer behind it and it should be a resounding [...]