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New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model
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Jack Herrick started wikiHow, a how-to Web site that allows anyone to write and edit entries, in January 2005.
A page from the wikiHow site, which hopes to turn a profit based on advertising and now has 10,000 entries in English, Spanish and German.
In 2004, Mr. Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. “If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work,” he said. “But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything.”
So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users — free — were more informative than those written by freelancers.
By ROBERT LEVINE
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