Comment Flawed business model (Score 1) 107
I see at least two big flaws in the business model for the Wikia engine--
1. Google can do it better if Wikia works
Insofar as Wikia derives competitive advantage over Google from community support of search result ranking, Google can copy the model easily.
In order for it to scale within Wikia, a large number of users must contribute to ranking. Once so trained, most of these users would not resist contributing in the same way to Google's rankings. The community of search ranking raters is very different from the kind of community that supports open source development, for example. It is much larger, much lower common denominator, concerned with results, without any axes to grind with the search providor.
Google, with its large user base, would soon overcome any initial Wikia advantage in stored rating data.
I do not see any other competitive advantage Wikia might depend on. On the other hand, I can think of a host of advantages Google enjoys (which I will not bother to list here).
2. The ratio of hard costs is high, and the scale is large
I suspect that the cost of infrastructure (machines, data centers, power, and people) to host the web in memory to support low-latency search at the Google scale would be difficult to support with a community model.
Most Wikipedia support comes from individual donations of spare time from the broader community (i.e., articles). I would think that Wikipedia's content-to-hosting cost ratio is orders of magnitude better than Wikia's would be.
1. Google can do it better if Wikia works
Insofar as Wikia derives competitive advantage over Google from community support of search result ranking, Google can copy the model easily.
In order for it to scale within Wikia, a large number of users must contribute to ranking. Once so trained, most of these users would not resist contributing in the same way to Google's rankings. The community of search ranking raters is very different from the kind of community that supports open source development, for example. It is much larger, much lower common denominator, concerned with results, without any axes to grind with the search providor.
Google, with its large user base, would soon overcome any initial Wikia advantage in stored rating data.
I do not see any other competitive advantage Wikia might depend on. On the other hand, I can think of a host of advantages Google enjoys (which I will not bother to list here).
2. The ratio of hard costs is high, and the scale is large
I suspect that the cost of infrastructure (machines, data centers, power, and people) to host the web in memory to support low-latency search at the Google scale would be difficult to support with a community model.
Most Wikipedia support comes from individual donations of spare time from the broader community (i.e., articles). I would think that Wikipedia's content-to-hosting cost ratio is orders of magnitude better than Wikia's would be.
