New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model
Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there. — In 2004, Mr. Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Herrick's 2004 acquisition of eHow gave him an established how-to archive built with paid freelancers. His interest in Wikipedia's model follows an earlier wave of wiki-style participation in shopping sites, showing that collaborative publishing was already moving beyond general reference.
The commercial appeal is lower-cost, continually expanded answers; the constraint is trust. Wikipedia had already restricted editing on selected articles amid documented vandalism, hoaxes, and inaccuracies, making editorial controls central to any profit-seeking adaptation.
First-order effects
- Herrick can position eHow's how-to archive around a collaborative publishing model rather than relying solely on commissioned freelance articles.
- Wikipedia's contributor-led format becomes a business-model reference point for commercial how-to publishers, not only a free reference service.
Second-order effects
- Commercial how-to sites must compete for contributors and reader trust at the same time: open participation can expand coverage, but the quality problems documented at Wikipedia create a moderation burden.
- Publishers using paid contributors face pressure to show where professional commissioning delivers value over a wiki-style archive that can be replenished by users.
Third-order effects
- If commercial wiki experiments retain reader trust, online reference and how-to publishing will increasingly separate content creation from content governance: the scalable asset is the managed archive, not each individually commissioned article.
- Wikipedia's editing restrictions indicate that the economics of participatory content depend on governance systems strong enough to protect the usefulness that attracts both readers and advertisers.
The trend: Online publishers are testing whether collaborative answer archives can lower content-production costs without sacrificing the credibility that makes those archives commercially valuable.