December 12, 2006 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Wikia (http://www.wikia.com), the commercial counterpart of the non-profit Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) founded by Jimmy Wales, is to provide a free web hosting service called "OpenServing" (http://www.openserving.com). Alongside hosting the company will provide free license software to assist developers in producing “community collaboration” websites. Surprisingly, contrary to existing revenue models, 100% of advertising revenues generated by any website part of the OpenServing scheme will be given to its developer.
"It is open-source software and open content," Wales said in a telephone interview with Reuter’s news agency. "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue."
Wikia will use software similar to that utilized by the Wikipedia encyclopedia - MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org) - developed by sports site ArmchairGM.com (http://www.armchairgm.com) – a site now owned by Wikia – which allows anyone to add and edit content at will under a range of topics. Utilizing this software, developers are able to create ‘Wikis’ on a multitude of topics.
Currently the bulk of Wikis are hosted at cost on the servers of private web hosting companies, or free of charge for a percentage of advertising revenue generated by a site. The introduction of "OpenServing" explodes these traditional revenue models.
Wales’ latest project comes on the tail of last week’s announcement that Amazon.com is now Wikia's first corporate investor. Amazon.com is also pursuing its own strategy of offering low-cost computers, data storage and website hosting services to companies.
Exactly how the OpenServing revenue model will be supported remains unspecified. “Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail,” explained Mr. Wales on the Wikia website.
