Free wiki hosting company Wikia to let you create your own question and answer sites
Wikia, a site which allows anyone to create their own free wiki page, has announced a new service, Answers from Wikia, that will enable anyone to create their own question and answer sites as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch closes out a rough arc for Jimmy Wales's for-profit Wikia. The company had staked its ambitions on an editable, community-ranked Web search engine, hyped in early 2008 as a human-powered challenge to Google — only for reviewers to pan its January 2008 public launch as a letdown, followed by a 30 percent staff cut in October 2008 and the quiet shutdown of Wikia Search by March 2009.
Answers from Wikia is the pivot away from that failure: instead of competing with search engines head-on, Wikia is moving into the question-and-answer territory that Search Engine Roundtable was already mapping back in 2007, when Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were being compared as answer-sharing systems. It reuses Wikia's core competency — free hosted communities — against a proven consumer format.
First-order effects
- Anyone can now spin up a hosted Q&A community at zero cost, putting DIY answer sites within reach of the same long tail that builds fan wikis on the platform.
- Jimmy Wales gets a new product narrative for a company whose previous flagship — Wikia Search — was shut down in 2009, replacing a lost bet with an incremental, cheaper one.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo Answers and similar incumbent Q&A properties face commoditized competition at the bottom of the market: free, wiki-style answer communities undercut the switching cost of starting yet another Q&A destination.
- Q&A pages are structurally strong SEO inventory, so Wikia gains an ad-monetizable pageview engine built by volunteer labor — the same economic logic that made its wiki farm work, applied to a format with higher query traffic.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, community-hosting platforms will keep diversifying into adjacent UGC formats (wikis, answers, forums) rather than betting the company on single moonshots like search — platform breadth over technical ambition.
- Answer content migrates toward whichever platform aggregates the most communities under one ad infrastructure, concentrating answer-engine economics — who captures the value of crowdsourced knowledge — in a few hosting players.
The trend: User-generated-content platforms are expanding from wikis into Q&A communities, trading high-risk search bets for cheap, SEO-rich community formats.