The million dollar waste of time
Am I the only person who isn’t excited about the Million Dollar Wiki? It’s one of those annoying things in the blogosphere that is going to make a select few people (John Chow and the guy behind the wiki) a lot of money while everybody else chases their tails trying to jump on the bandwagon.
Stop! The million dollar wiki is not worth your time and effort.
The way the Million Dollar Wiki works is that a bright spark named Graham Langdon created a wiki and started selling pages on it for $100. There are 10,000 pages available so Graham stands to make $1,000,000. Throw in a few sob stories about Graham having student debts to pay off and you’ve got people hooked. While nobody could say that Graham was making a mistake, perhaps people splashing out on the wiki pages are.
It’s only $100
If you think like that then you don’t belong in this game. Only $100 could be used on any number of things, including higher ranking links than the Million Dollar Wiki will ever get you. Heck, you can get yourself reviewed on Cash Quests for $70 and have $30 left over for pizza.
The content of the wiki is abysmal. From a reader’s perspective, which is how I approached it when I first logged on, there is very little of value there. There is no logic or method to how the pages are arranged. You can either view a random page or else view the pages in a list of popularity. What good is that to anybody?
There are 265 pages sold so far. Most of those pages have less than 100 page views and will probably get buried beneath even more pages. John Chow, smart as ever, promoted the Million Dollar Wiki on his blog through a paid review. He made a point to say that he had bought a page which inspired 70 of his readers to shell out for pages themselves. Now he has teamed up with Graham and is running a contest for people who buy a page or write a review of the contest.
The majority of pages on the Million Dollar Wiki are nothing more than adverts. I’d be wary about purchasing a page just because John Chow told you to.
Like this post? Subscribe to the feedShare:
Digg it for goodness sake! Stumble your heart out!
5 Responses to “The million dollar waste of time”
I like the 30 dollars left over for pizza – that’s like 6 pizzas from dominoes. Perhaps more in Thailand – I don’t know, if rent is $150 there, what’s a pizza go for? $0.84?
I have to disagree with you that there is no logical organization. They have a growing list of categories that feature good pages. Also, keep in mind that the site is only two months old, and many of the pages have been purchased in the last two weeks. How quickly are you expecting the page owners to put up content? It takes time man.
I think this site is awesome and has a lot of promise.
Check out my page
http://www.milliondollarwiki.com/blog
Yes that’s true. We’ll see how things pan out then. Good point.
I think that there are a lot of intelligent people out there that are more than creative enough to make money off of the MDW http://www.milliondollarwiki.com/Money is proof of that. Some of the page owners have already cashed in and paid for their pages already, not bad for a measly 100 bucks. I there is nothing like really cheap advertising.
While I agree that some people will make money, I think that a lot of the people who make a page, particularly those who sign up for the sake of John Chow’s competition, will not make money and will dilute the quality of the content.