Topic: Wikidot.com popular wiki hosting, 14y history, $250,000/year revenue - 280 BTC (Read 396 times)

Is this still for sale? Could you give me a rate adjusted for bitcoin fluctuation from 2020 to now? I am assuming you were asking for the value at the time, which would've been around 10k. Regardless I am interested.  

Edit: My apologies, I was looking at rates for single BTC.

Just a reminder I still have not heard anything from you regarding my message sent on the 30th.

Just did that.

As most businesses (and the whole advertising market) we were affected by COVID-19. Simply speaking the whole market got down, apparently several companies cut advertising costs which resulted in overall prize drops for online ads - and revenue drops for online publishers. March and April figures for ad-related revenue dropped significantly (by over 50%), but we already seeing the trends getting up again.

If you have any questions just PM me or post here.

Best,
Michal

Hello, please enable PMs from new users so we can discuss.

Hi,

I am Michal Frackowiak. In 2006 I created Wikidot, an online platform that allows anyone to create a wiki site. Wikidot was received really well, got an early seed investment from Pieter Hintjens (yep, this Pieter Hintjens, creator of AMQP and ZeroMQ, a visionaire, activist and entrepreneur) with whom we founded Wikidot Inc., a company running Wikidot.com. We worked together for years, trying to make Wikidot.com a number-one stop for anyone wanting to publish things, collaborate, share. And we succeeded even without the millions of dollars our competitors had.

In the last months however we decided to move forward and sell Wikidot.com, either the online service alone or the whole company. We are already working on another blockchain-based startup and although Wikidot is a great project we feel personally attached to, we decided to use our knowledge and experience in a new field.

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What is Wikidot (a crash course)

- "wiki" is a type of website you can create and edit in a browser
- pages are usually written in "wiki syntax" - similar to the post syntax on this forum, but a bit more advanced
- once you create a site and its pages, you can invite your friends and publish together
- Wikidot allows anyone to create a wiki-type website and is a mix of wiki hub and a social network
- people use Wikidot to publish blogs, create fan pages, forums, collaborate, publish knowledge bases etc.
- Wikidot has an advanced engine with a powerful set of modules and extensions

Some example sites hosted at Wikidot.com

- SCP-Wiki - http://scp-wiki.net - massive fantasy writing collaboration project. Highly addictive!
- AQW Wiki - http://aqwwiki.wikidot.com - on online knowledge base about Adventure Quest World game, moderated by Artix, the company that runs the game.
- WikiWealth - http://www.wikiwealth.com - WikiWealth is a collaborative research and analysis website (stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, currencies, commodities).
- My own blog - http://michalf.me - a blog I started a while ago, not updated for a loooong time now.
- Dark Souls Wiki - http://darksouls.wikidot.com - one of the biggest wikis about Dark Souls.
- Icon Deposit - https://www.icondeposit.com - large deposit of icons for the modern web.
- some other random sites: http://cyclods.wikidot.com, http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com, http://forestaction.wikidot.com, http://www.ereticopedia.org, http://flowpy.wikidot.com, http://ftales.wikidot.com, http://pfcuq.wikidot.com
- Search Google for more examples of sites hosted at Wikidot: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikidot.com

Existing competitors

There are not many competitors of that size that offers wikis that easily accessible. Wikidot is unique in this matter.

- Wikispaces - http://wikispaces.com -  (closing by the end of Jan) - one of the largest wiki hosting platforms, offered wikis for individuals, educational institutions and companies.
- PBWorks - http://pbworks.com - (formerly PBWiki) - concentrates on businesses and institutions, it's more a collaboration platform now. It started as a pure-wiki project, similar to Wikidot.
- Wix - http://wix.com - not a wiki platform, but probably the largest "website builder" out there
- Wikia - http://wikia.com - the largest wiki hub, but nothing that you create belongs to you. You cannot just "create your own wiki". It is now a hub of curated content sites.

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So, why would anyone want to buy Wikidot.com?

1. It's got revenue. It's 100% legal, taxable etc.

The revenue comes from two sources:

    1. Ads placed on selected sites (most free sites + sites we have special agreements with people that run them). Depending on a month it's $20,000 - $25,000 USD.

    2. Paid upgrades - from users who want to step up from free plan. It's not much, around $2,000 monthly.

The site is not flooded with ads and there is definitely room for improvements. We've been working with a number of ad agencies in the past, right now we stick to Media.net and NitroPay - they do most of the work for us, but the ad landscape is changing constantly.

The revenue is solid, but depends on traffic, part of the year and other variables. It needs regular tuning too.


2. It's a well established, legitimate project

Since 2006 Wikidot.com has been gaining popularity. Over years the community expanded and number of hosted sites grew dramatically. The project not only has momentum, but has a good reputation. It's in top-1000 US domains according to Quantcast, has decent real traffic and momentum that can be used to accelerate growth even more. Yep, we have our Wikipedia entry too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidot

3. It has stable traffic, quite a lot!!!


If you have experience monetizing the traffic (e.g. ads), the potential is really huge. The traffic is stable and is a result of steady organic growth.

4. It's well-coded and straightforward to maintain

The project is written in PHP and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The whole server configuration is done via Chef, so even server configuration is pure git-versioned code.

5. Paying customers

If you want to concentrate on paying clients, we have individuals, professionals, institutional clients (e.g. European Bank workgroup) and companies (MakerBot, Artix Entertainment) that already pay for our services. That's a great starting point. Most of our competitors (PBWiki, WikiSpaces) moved their interest away from individual users and concentrated on companies and institutions and this can be done.

6. It's a stable business, with history

If you want to turn your coins into a real-world project, take a deeper look. Wikidot is a project with 12-year history. It had ups and downs, but it's definitely something you can build upon. The project is a result of thousands of hours of coding, promoting and hard work. It resisted economy downturns and will probably last as long as the Internet itself in good hands and some love.

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Things to know

Above all I value honesty in business, and sure there are some risks involved. I'd rather list them all here rather than let someone discover them later.

1. The code, software and servers need some love

We've been running Wikidot on the same codebase from 2006. Sure, the code has evolved a lot, we've been adding a lot of features, migrating to newer PHP versions, newer libraries etc. But it's a process that needs to be continued. Some of the software components might get out of date. Software versions will need upgrades at some point and whoever decides to work on Wikidot must be aware of this. This applies to any software project, not only Wikidot.

2. Spam

Wikidot.com offers quite a lot for free and some people abuse Wikidot from time to time. This includes: automated account creation, automated site creation, spamming existing sites. We tried several solutions in the past, including automated filters, various scripts etc. but it's an ongoing process. Whenever you offer anything for free, there will be people that will try to abuse it.

3. Revenue

The revenue mostly come from ads and it fluctuates. Keeping the revenue high requires working with multiple agencies and supervising the content. Finding decent ad agencies to monetize the traffic is not always easy either, but we have deals with Media.net and Nitropay, which work pretty well. See the attached charts for 12-month revenue.

4. Monthly costs

Wikidot is hosted on AWS and the monthly bill (the only hard cost of Wikidot.com) is stable at about $5,000-$6,000 (plus VAT if you're based in EU). I'll be happy to send you a detailed breakdown. If a buyer could find a better/cheaper/more efficient way of hosting Wikidot this cost could probably be reduced, but believe me I've seen monthly bills waaaay higher for much smaller services than Wikidot.

5. Staff

Even a small team (or a single developer) can maintain Wikidot. Support and communication with users have to be handled too. I believe a larger team with a good leadership could considerably push the project forward. Improving sales and working on monetization could be your next steps.

6. Wikidot would benefit from some extra work... and love too

During the last few years we've been searching for other opportunities and moved our focus away from Wikidot. It definitely got less attention than needed and, honestly speaking, Wikidot was a bit neglected. We haven't been actively developing Wikidot for some time now, mostly maintaining the platform only. Some fresh air would definitely wake up the project, that's something we cannot do anymore.

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What you get if you buy...

... Wikidot.com alone

If you buy Wikdot.com (the online service) alone, it includes the (rented) servers, domains, code, all rights, licenses, data - just everything Wikidot.com consists of and what is required to run it. The new buyer would probably need to arrange new deals with payment processing companies (we use PayPal and Multicards now) and new deals with ad networks. Maybe the current deals could be modified to point to the new owner, this can be checked.

You'll also get our technical assistance for the transition period, so we'll help you understand how things work and get things going.

... the whole company, Wikidot Inc.

You can also buy the whole company, Wikidot Inc (founded 2007, clean records). The company is incorporated in Delaware and operates as a branch office in Poland. It complies with all Polish regulations and pays taxes in Poland. It's a Closed Corporation and there are currently two shareholders, me (the majority shareholder) and my business partner from Belgium. You could purchase 100% of shares, thus the ownership of the whole company and all its intellectual property.


Needless to say you'll also get our technical support for the transition period, so we'll help you understand how things work to get things going. We could also help you find legal advisor in Poland should you need any.

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Me and my team have put a lot of effort into building Wikidot, but it's time to move on. We have engeneering background and we are looking for new opportunities, but we are leaving this business in good shape. I hope it will fall into good hands. If you need any info, send me a PM or post in this thread - I'd be glad to answer any questions.

Best,
Michal Frackowiak

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More about the Wikidot: https://www.wikidot.com/about
Company details in Delaware Corp Registry: https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/ecorp/entitysearch/namesearch.aspx (file number: 4326793)
Wikipedia entry for Wikidot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidot

I can grant access to Google Analytics to anyone seriously interested.