Wikia and Wikipedia — “unconnected”?
Within a larger Wikipedia Review message thread, a comment was made that Wikia officials say, “Wikimedia and Wikia are completely unconnected. There is no financial, legal, or any other connection between the two…”
That’s like asking the Bush Administration if there is a connection between Big Oil’s influence on the administration and the decision to go to war in Iraq. I’m pretty sure you’ll be told “there’s no financial, legal, or any other connection between the oil industry and the Commander In Chief”.
I’m not even going to get into the staffing “connections”, but you may want to look into the roles of Jimmy Wales, Angela Beesley, Michael E. Davis, and (until he was discovered to be lying about his credentials) Ryan Jordan, vis-a-vis Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Each of these holds (or held) prominent positions in both entities. In the real world, this usually generates some measure of separation to avoid perceived or actual “conflict of interest”, but how well is it actually being done over there? Gil Penchina (CEO of Wikia) was in attendance at Wikimania 2007. Why is that, if he’s “completely unconnected“?
I would say having 9,460 outbound links from Wikipedia to Wikia is most certainly not “completely unconnected” — especially considering that when Jimmy Wales authorized “nofollow”, many of the links to Wikia were exempt from that Google-dampening measure.
I would say Amazon being the sole investor in Wikia’s second round of capital generation, coupled with 27,568 outbound links from Wikipedia to Amazon, not to mention the 119,699 outbound links from Wikipedia to IMDB.com, which is owned by — guess who? — Amazon, is most certainly not “completely unconnected“. Guess what is on virtually every page of IMDB.com? That’s right — glitzy images and links to buy products from Amazon, even in German or French.
Come on, folks — I expect better critical analysis from you. Millions of dollars aren’t being “donated” to Jimmy Wales’ commercial project, without some form of kickback expected or appreciated. The only place where Wales has influence that has the traffic and size to be meaningful to Amazon as a revenue source is Wikipedia (not Wikia). Why is it so important for an “encyclopedia” to include convenient links to stores to buy titles? Is the average Wikipedia user so addle-brained that they need one-click-shopping from their neighborhood encyclopedia, too? Why so many links specifically to Amazon properties, and not “free” sites or “competitor” sites? Sounds to me that Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia emphatically draw the line at paid editing and corporate PR editing, but a little linky-linky, winky-winky — that’s perfectly encouraged.
I want to let everyone in on a secret. I was contacted a few months ago by someone who was exploiting Wikipedia to drive traffic to Amazon products being sold on an Associates basis. He documented to me his 32 external links successfully placed on Wikipedia. Granted, they were for movie and book products that are best-sellers, not obscure titles as are many of the Wikipedia links to Amazon products, but just run with me here for a second. He showed me his past 10 days of Amazon associates revenues — these represent 4% of all the sales made on Amazon after a click-through from one of his links. He had made $27.13 from 32 links in 10 days. That equates to $30.95 per link per year — and that’s just his 4% cut from Amazon! That means Amazon is selling $773.75 worth of merchandise from each of his links, per year.
Let me repeat — Amazon (and IMDB) enjoy nearly 150,000 outbound links from Wikipedia. Even if our secret exploiter’s return on investment is TWENTY TIMES that of the average outbound link, we can still deduce that Amazon is turning revenues of $5.8 million per year from Wikipedia. Assume a 15% profit margin, and we conclude that Amazon is clearing $870,000 annual profit from Wikipedia.
MyWikiBiz cleared less than $1,000 for directly editing Wikipedia, yet it generated a flap of at least 180 mainstream media mentions, and tens of thousands of words on Wikipedia discussion pages and lists. Amazon clears $870,000 per year for having direct connections from Wikipedia, and where is the flap? Why haven’t Steve Rubel or Brian Bergstein or Seth Finkelstein written about this scam? Maybe because readers who believe what Wikia tells them would dismiss it anyway.
Will the Wikipedia Review community please wake up?
Thank you for a fine detailed explanation of the value of outgoing links. You also touch on the general “Good Will” appropriated from WP by Wikia. I recently looked over Wikia and while it seems very consciously scrubbed clean of any obvious reference to WP the fact remains without WP Wikia would be nothing at all. Is there any generally accepted accounting or business means of establishing the value of this Good Will?
GlassBeadGame
13 Aug 07 at 3:40 pm
Okay thanks for your first blog post. It is good to see we are having different posters. It might be easier to read if you clicked on the “read more” button after the first 2 paragraphs, to make it easier to read. It kind of looks like a box.
It was interesting to see the financial links from one to the other, eye-opening really.
But remember that the blog is intended to be written for the outside world, not specifically for WR readers. It is meant to be written on behalf of WR for the outside world. I just noted in your post that you made a few references to WR readers, who aren’t meant to be our primary audience.
Anyway, keep it up. That was a good post.
blissyu2
13 Aug 07 at 4:01 pm
Seth Finkelstein has offered some good rebuttals to many of the claims I have made or implied here. I’ll hope that he might respond on his own, otherwise I’ll try to post what he had to say (later).
thekohser
13 Aug 07 at 6:09 pm
This was in a private communication of some sort?
I’ll admit, I myself have a few qualms with some of the precepts here - most importantly with the implied method of link valuation. I’d say you’re clearly in the Advertising/PR camp, which tends to value the link much more highly than the manufacturing/services management camp. (I’m probably somewhere in the middle - I’d probably call it the “salesman camp,” except that there actually are special camps for salesmen, and I wouldn’t want to confoozle people.)
IMO you have to look at the traffic analysis in terms of “click sequence” - IOW, the consumer goes to the search engine first, which we’ll just call “Google” for short, then to one of the top results (which for Google always includes WP), and then to the product. If WP didn’t have links to the product, the consumer would just go back to Google and click on one that does, assuming Amazon itself isn’t right there in the first page of results (as it often is, also).
Having a direct link to Amazon from Wikipedia is probably worth plenty, and not having them might reduce sales somewhat, but you seem to be implying here that link value = total profit, and that’s not something I’m prepared to agree with… yet.
Regardless of that, it was a superb post, and I certainly hope you’ll do some more of ‘em!
Somey
14 Aug 07 at 9:01 pm
You are simply wrong. WP is nothing like as slick as you are making out. It’s a cockup not a conspiracy. But you are right that it’s exploitable. So far, no one has shown enough interest in exploiting it.
I think you should focus your attack more closely on the hypocrisy of permitting clearly POV editors free rein while not permitting paid editors. In the former case, the argument is that if they stay within the NPOV guidelines (which of course they do ;-)), there’s no harm done. I don’t see why the latter wouldn’t apply to you. This is an area in which your whining is much sounder.
But Wikipedia doesn’t run on reason. It runs on whatever a dozen troubled teens and weirdos think it should at any given time. It’s not coherent or sensible, and it’s not likely to become either in a hurry.
Dr Zen
15 Aug 07 at 3:33 am