When we launched Wikidot.com three years ago we had the vision of offering a reliable, fast, and economic way of building web sites, wikis, and social web applications. It was not clear, at the start, whether this plan would work. Today, I'm happy to be able to tell you that after almost a year of having introduced Pro accounts, Wikidot is making a modest but growing profit.
That profit goes back into the service. We're bringing new developers into the team. We've just done a smooth upgrade of our database servers and will now roll out similar boxes across our cluster (fast new CPUs and SSD drives). You'll have seen that Wikidot is 3-5x faster today that it was a week ago. We intend to keep those improvements coming. And new features, bug fixes and more.
With hard work, a hyperactive user community, and some patience, we're building a sustainable business. This is great news for those of us who put our sites on Wikidot.com and wonder, sometimes, whether this is a safe long term prospect. The answer is: yes, Wikidot.com is here for the long term. If we can grow profitably during a global financial crisis, then our original vision was accurate.
A good answer for a long lasting question…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Very good news indeed. I notice Wikidot will hit the 4,000,000 pages and 400,000 users sometime next week. Has anyone on the team plotted user numbers over time? When can we expect 500,000 users? What about 5 million?
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I don't think there are 5 million people in the world that are fortunate enough to own a computer, let alone a subscription to the internet as well. Oops, I was thinking "5 billion" :)
Still, that is a lot.
~ Shane (Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer)
Wikidot: Wikidot Editor, Official Docs
Other: YouTube (gaming, primarily Minecraft)
Hi Shane, it's true that 5 million is a lot of people, but Facebook & Twitter both have more than 5 million users, and I believe that Wikidot is heaps better than either. I think 5 million is a realistic number of users to aim for in the medium term, but perhaps 50 million would be an even better aspirational goal? I know I'm not comparing apples with apples, but I still think it is worth thinking about.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I do believe we have five brazilion users, though… :-) Muito obrigado!
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lol, do we know how many people do own a computer? certainly more than 5 million :)
Does wikidot work on real hardware or does it work on virtual servers?
Kenneth Tsang (@jxeeno)
We use a mix of as-fast-as-possible real hardware, as-cheap-as-possible virtual servers, and as-distributed-as-possible cloud servers (for static files).
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On Michals blog you will find some tests with amazons cloud computing.
But today i think wikidot works on "REAL" hardware - the cloud computing works on "real" hardware too :) but out of single - self- control…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Revision 2.
We are a bit hyperactive, aren't we ;-)
~ Shane (Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer)
Wikidot: Wikidot Editor, Official Docs
Other: YouTube (gaming, primarily Minecraft)
Just a wee bit. Can't complain… :-)
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holly smokes! wikidot profitable? look at this! it says wikidot is worth $726,875.6 USD!
it also say that wikidot makes almost a $1000 a day from adds when it barely even has any! wow!
You'll notice that websiteoutlook.com calculates the value of a website at exactly 2 x 365 x daily ad revenue. It also calculates advertising revenue from total traffic to a site, assuming that every page has ads. I'm not sure what per-page metric it's using then, since ad revenue varies enormously.
Our actual ad revenue is much lower, sadly. Well, happily too, since it means we can plan to remove all ads, eventually, without destroying our business model.
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