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_ The Jimbo Phenomenon _ Wales to MySpace
Posted by: thekohser
This comes from the Jonny Cache file of "why are reporters of mid-grade reputation suddenly piling on the Wikipedia bandwagon". My dad -- born before FDR's first "Fireside chat" -- e-mailed me, noting:
And you wonder where I get my skepticism? Note that my 74-year-old Pop is even noticing all the fluffy pro-Wikipedia journalism lately.
Anyway, see what Jimbo had to say about MySpace http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/columnists/orl-horowitz0307nov03,0,1040935.column:
Let's put MySpace on the death watch list, everyone. Jimbo knows a thing or two about doomed enterprises. Look at Bomis today. Look at the progress that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openserving is (not) making.
I hope you all click through to Horowitz's column, and especially observe Comment #1.
Greg
P.S. Just in case the Sentinel (or, as we used to call it, the SLANTinel) deletes my comment in the Wikipediot fashion, here's what I said:
As for doomed enterprises like MySpace... Jimmy should know something about doomed operations. Where is Bomis.com today? How is that Openserving.com project of his going, now that it's been up and running for a year?
Regarding restaurants where people attack each other with knives -- let's think of a more apt analogy. If Wikipedia is a restaurant, that restaurant is serving food that is 100% delicious, but only 98% authentic. Your mashed potatoes are mixed in with 2% sawdust. Your Bloody Mary has 2% sheep's blood in it. Do you know what you're eating and drinking are tainted? No, probably not -- it still tastes delicious. When some expert points out to you the facts, though, what would you do -- as a responsible journalist? Wouldn't you inform your readers of the sawdust and sheep's blood scandal?
That's what's happening on Wikipedia right now. It is the world's most irresponsible encyclopedia, hiding behind Section 230 to enjoy saying that it is not a "publisher" of content, but rather a mere "Internet service provider". Come now, when you read Wikipedia, do you perceive that the content has been "published" for your edification, or merely that it is being "service provided" to you? Be honest with your answer.
Your readers would welcome some more cutting investigative reporting, rather than this PR "puff piece" that you've generated here. Here's where you can start -- why is the Wikimedia Foundation budgeting $4.6 million for 2008, when they've gotten by with a mere fraction of that amount in all previous years? Could you explain why they've operated without an Executive Director for a long time, but suddenly need to pay the new one imported from Canada (and her still unhired staff) over $500,000 next year? Yet, at the same time, the fundraising message is that the money is going to poor, uneducated Africans. It's going to a white, privileged woman named Sue Gardner -- but nobody's reporting on that. Please, we're begging you, do your job as a journalist, not a marketing flack.
Posted by: guy
Etan Horowitz sounds Jewish. Does he know how Jimmy's pal Jayjg tried to destroy the List of American Jewish journalists and recruited a meatpuppet to help him?
Posted by: thekohser
Bummer that this juicy thread isn't getting much traction with WR.
Posted by: Kato
Bummer that this juicy thread isn't getting much traction with WR.
Maybe add a SlimVirgin angle to it and just watch those viewing figures shoot through the roof.
Posted by: The Joy
Bummer that this juicy thread isn't getting much traction with WR.
What gives Jimbo the right to tell others like Murdoch (who makes more than a few million on Fox and other investments) that they've made a bad business decision?
Wikia maybe one of Jimbo's best business decisions but his other ventures haven't done so well. Murdoch's been around for hundreds of years and he does not buy or invest in something unless he darn well knows he'll make money off it.
Sorry, the Kohser, that Jimbo-related business issues don't always get on radar here. Since that "charity" thread, I've been curious about where all the money donated to Wikipedia goes and whether donors really understand what they are funding. I'd tell any potential donor just to watch the Administrator's Noticeboard for a week. There's always something psychotic going on there and who would want to donate money to website run by such weirdoes?
Do we know much about Wikia's profits and about how much Jimbo makes from it and his role as chairman emeritus of the WMF? I bet Murdoch still makes more than Jimbo.
Posted by: Kato
I bet Murdoch still makes more than Jimbo.
And the rest.
Murdoch vs Wales. Now that's one knife fight to the death I'd pay to see.
Despite my deeply spiritual and fully committed loathing for Der Jimbo, I think I'd still be rooting for him against Rupert the bad. Haranguing Wales online with crude jokes and a few exposés is nothing. I remember when The People went to War against Murdoch in the 1980s. And lost!
Posted by: WhispersOfWisdom
Jimmy Wales up against NewsCorp. ??? I do not think so.
The foundation might be able to fetch a net number in the low $millions.
Rupert is closer to $250,000,000,000+.
Without the alliance between Google and WP, there would be no WP.
Mr. Murdoch has a franchise (MySpace) that is at least worth as much as Facebook, now valued by the Microsoft venture, at nearly $15,000,000,000...(yes, billion U.S. dollars.)
Google and MySpace just launched the next social site which will take sides.
Jimmy either joins them now, or his franchise is in more trouble than MySpace.
I remember when MySpace was purchased by NewsCorp. for $600,000,000.
That was only a few years ago.
No Jimmy, your trading was not that good. Predictions like that will not get you anywhere.
Posted by: thekohser
Do we know much about Wikia's profits and about how much Jimbo makes from it and his role as chairman emeritus of the WMF? I bet Murdoch still makes more than Jimbo.
Jimbo makes nothing (directly) from the Wikimedia Foundation. Just the perks of compensated travel and the ability to bound about, talking about the wonders of Wikia in the same speeches where he's supposed to be talking about Wikipedia.
As for Wikia, I calculate that it is just finally becoming profitable, after paying salaries of staff, insurance, taxes, hosting costs, and infrastructure. Let's do the math...
Wikia reports 250 million page views per month. Typically, wiki pages get Google ad click-through rates of perhaps one-half percent. That's 1.25 million click-throughs per month. Google ads in wikis average about 29 cents per click paid to the hosting site. So, Wikia might be drawing about $360,000 in revenues per month. They have 35 employees on staff. Assume that they make an average salary (even very conservatively) of $45,000 per year. Salaries alone would cost $131,000 a month. Typical multiples for total expenses in a dot-com over base salary are (I don't really know) perhaps in the 2x or 2.5x range, maybe? Let's just guess that Wikia has total costs of doing business of $300,000 per month. That means they're making $60,000 in profit each month, or a 16% net return on investment -- not too shabby.
Rupert Murdoch would laugh heartily at the measly amounts discussed above, of course.
Greg
Posted by: Cobalt
Myspace is totally dead. Nobody uses it anymore. 'Cept for all the high school/college students/musicians/comedians/etc who still go there but they're soooo last Tuesday.
I doubt he's got a talent for predicting things.
Posted by: WhispersOfWisdom
My opinions only:
1.) Without Google, their (WP and Wikia) model fails. It is Google that gets people to WP.
2.) Without advertising $$, none of the sites exist. (That will eventually apply to WP.)
3.) Revenue per click is declining.
4.) Google has a plan; if it does not involve WP and Jimmy, WP and Jimmy go away. The foundation will be forced to sell and / or merge into a taxable entity. Then they could get some real money.
5.) Google and MySpace are joining forces. (They are launching a social site.)
6.) Microsoft invested in FaceBook because they had to get in the game.
7.) The demise of MySpace has been talked about since they started. (It is not happening.)
8.) YouTube is now owned by Google.
9.) NewsCorp, Apple, Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, and many others will be acquired or merge.
10.) Everything will eventually be owned by a bank or insurance company. Nothing is too large... until the next great depression or the Web2.0 bubble has burst. Jimmy must sell or merge. He must find a way to get at the clicks. WP could become a social site. His company is not in the game. WP was like the Beatles...right time and place, you know? Wikia is not growing like WP; is not going the way of WP. Jimmy is not in that game. 
Posted by: Chris Croy
Experiment: Go hit random article 10 times. Take those 10 articles and search for their title on Google, Yahoo, Ask, AOL, and any other search engines you want to try. Google ranks Wikipedia high, but they are by no means the only search engine to do so.
Yes. Some, such as our friends at Google, want to replace it with 'Time spent looking at a site'. Hmm...What site tends to have relatively long articles people would want to read? Oh. Wikipedia.
Have you ever heard of Windows Live Spaces? I hadn't. It's bigger than Facebook and Myspace put together.
Grow or die. Facebook is in a period of exponential growth. MySpace is not.
Posted by: thekohser
Have you ever heard of Windows Live Spaces? I hadn't. It's bigger than Facebook and Myspace put together.
I would be curious how you http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/05/facebook_visits_up_106_since_o.html.
Posted by: Chris Croy
Have you ever heard of Windows Live Spaces? I hadn't. It's bigger than Facebook and Myspace put together.
I would be curious how you http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/05/facebook_visits_up_106_since_o.html.
The first thing I checked was Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites, which says Live has 120 million users vs Facebook's 73 and Myspace's 107. I compared this to Alexa's listings. You can see the graph http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=spaces.live.com&site1=facebook.com&site2=myspace.com&y=p&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=1y&size=Medium&url=wikimediafoundation.org. A quick look at 'daily reach' gives Live.com a vast, VAST lead over the others - bigger than both combined. However, upon closer examination I noticed Alexa disregarded the modifier of 'spaces.live.com' and just made it 'live.com', making the comparison extremely lopsided. Wikipedia's source link is broken, leaving me on my own for verifying where that number came from.
Then I found the answer: Microsoft is using a very unique definition of user
First, http://specials.uk.msn.com/spaces/about.aspx for the 120 million quote, so we know it's not something someone cut from whole cloth. A little googling turned up http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/03/HNspacesliveproblems_1.html, which lays it out: They get 120 million UNIQUE HITS, but they only have 40 million registered users.
My curiosity was piqued. I checked out the source linked for MySpace's and Facebook's numbers, I find that it says NOTHING OF THE KIND. It doesn't comment on their actual number of accounts at all.
It's too damn late. Fixing THOSE sourcing problems will take at least 10 minutes, on top of the others I'll discover in the meanwhile. I'm going to sleep.
Posted by: thekohser
Have you ever heard of Windows Live Spaces? I hadn't. It's bigger than Facebook and Myspace put together.
I would be curious how you http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/05/facebook_visits_up_106_since_o.html.
The first thing I checked was Wikipedia's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites, which says Live has 120 million users vs Facebook's 73 and Myspace's 107. I compared this to Alexa's listings. You can see the graph http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=spaces.live.com&site1=facebook.com&site2=myspace.com&y=p&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=1y&size=Medium&url=wikimediafoundation.org. A quick look at 'daily reach' gives Live.com a vast, VAST lead over the others - bigger than both combined. However, upon closer examination I noticed Alexa disregarded the modifier of 'spaces.live.com' and just made it 'live.com', making the comparison extremely lopsided. Wikipedia's source link is broken, leaving me on my own for verifying where that number came from.
Then I found the answer: Microsoft is using a very unique definition of user
First, http://specials.uk.msn.com/spaces/about.aspx for the 120 million quote, so we know it's not something someone cut from whole cloth. A little googling turned up http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/03/HNspacesliveproblems_1.html, which lays it out: They get 120 million UNIQUE HITS, but they only have 40 million registered users.
My curiosity was piqued. I checked out the source linked for MySpace's and Facebook's numbers, I find that it says NOTHING OF THE KIND. It doesn't comment on their actual number of accounts at all.
It's too damn late. Fixing THOSE sourcing problems will take at least 10 minutes, on top of the others I'll discover in the meanwhile. I'm going to sleep.
And, thus, as it usually is with Wikipedia. The first-mover advantage goes to the editor who can enter information first into Wikipedia -- especially with an official-looking (but nonetheless bogus) reference citation... It's too much work to prove the source wrong AND replace it with correct information and a better source.
You would think Microsoft is influencing Wikipedia to overstate its user and penetration statistics. But Microsoft would NEVER do that, with "complex investigators" like Durova keeping watch, right? I've read in several places that Wikipedia's 1,100 admins keep the site very clean and free of incorrect information, so that must be true.
Greg
Posted by: Chris Croy
Incidentally, lunch made me remember how I might've screwed up on the other source. So I went over to the article again and checked the source again. See, it was almost 2 AM and I had to sleep and stuff. I had just done a quick text search for 'million', 'facebook', and some others. When I didn't find it, I went to sleep.
When I looked at it today, it occurred to me it might be in a PICTURE and thus not searchable. I had automatically tuned out the picture in the middle of the article as one of those annoying ads that screws up article formatting.
Mea culpa and whatnot.
Posted by: the fieryangel
I think that WMF already sees that donations are down...So they're trying to get the press out to drum up business.
The thing is, this kind of "nickle dime" operation is not how you run a not-for-profit. You DO ask for private contribututions, but you go agressively after foundation money...
WMF hasn't figured this out...or more probably, they have figured out that the kind of questions that these people will ask is more trouble than it's worth.....
So, they're stuck with....Janey's lunch money as their principal funding source.
Pretty pathetic, even for WP.
Posted by: thekohser
In April 2007, Jimmy Wales said "http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2102112,00.html"
Later, in November 2007, Wales opined "http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2007-11-03/business/horowitz03_1_wikipedia-jimmy-wales-copyright"
Since 2007, MySpace has indeed dropped in average daily reach of Internet users from about 10% of the population to about 3% of the population, according to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com#trafficstats. It is still the 11th most popular website in the United States, though.
Strange definition of "doomed" and "two more years", Jimbo.
Posted by: A Horse With No Name
Since 2007, MySpace has indeed dropped in average daily reach of Internet users from about 10% of the population to about 3% of the population, according to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com#trafficstats. It is still the 11th most popular website in the United States, though.
Hey, Uncle Big Bad, where does Wikipedia rank in comparison to MySpace for the 2007 to 2010 period?
Posted by: thekohser
Since 2007, MySpace has indeed dropped in average daily reach of Internet users from about 10% of the population to about 3% of the population, according to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com#trafficstats. It is still the 11th most popular website in the United States, though.
Hey, Uncle Big Bad, where does Wikipedia rank in comparison to MySpace for the 2007 to 2010 period?
Essentially, they switched spaces on the Internet rankings.
Posted by: Cunningly Linguistic
A lot of the musicians I deal with, although they did have MySpace pages they are leaving them where they are, unattended and not brought up to date, and moving across to Facebook. As most of them are of the older end of the spectrum are, by and large, totally confused with Twitter.
Posted by: Eva Destruction
Since 2007, MySpace has indeed dropped in average daily reach of Internet users from about 10% of the population to about 3% of the population, according to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com#trafficstats. It is still the 11th most popular website in the United States, though.
Hey, Uncle Big Bad, where does Wikipedia rank in comparison to MySpace for the 2007 to 2010 period?
Essentially, they switched spaces on the Internet rankings.
I'm seeing http://www.alexa.com/topsites, FWIW. MS might not be dead, but with the full power of the Murdoch empire behind it it's still a wretched performance.
Posted by: thekohser
I'm seeing http://www.alexa.com/topsites, FWIW. MS might not be dead, but with the full power of the Murdoch empire behind it it's still a wretched performance.
I think I was giving the "United States" sub-total ranking, not the global ranking which I surmise is in place on the "topsites" page. But, I make so many mistakes on here, don't trust me on this.
Posted by: thekohser
Could a moderator move this thread into the http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=13649, or move the older thread to the top of this one? I like that it stay in "The Jimbo Phenomenon", though.
According to Alexa...
MySpace is the 29th most popular web domain now.
Wikia is 207th.
According to Jimmy Wales, MySpace was going to be "doomed" by November 2009. That was almost a year ago, yet MySpace still gets about six times as many daily page views as Wikia does. It sure sucks to be "doomed", huh?
Posted by: Somey
OK, done!
I've always wondered if most of the shifts in popularity for these sites doesn't have something to do with aesthetics. MySpace pages are almost completely under the control of the user, and most of them look horrendous. Wikia is actually trying to spruce things up slightly, but MediaWiki pages don't give enough control to the user, so most of their pages still look boring - and of course, anyone can change them, so nobody really wants to put that much effort into making them nice unless the stakes are high enough (i.e., Wikipedia) to justify the long-term timesink for defending them.
Facebook and Twitter, for all their general evil-ness, have clean, simple, but generally attractive pages. Facebook seems to strike a reasonably good balance between too much and too little control for the user, and you don't have those pages (like on MySpace) where you're scrolling over a huge background image, trying to read the tiny little text over it. Why do people on MySpace even do that? It's like they want visitors to suffer.
Still, I spend far more time looking up obscure alt-rock bands on MySpace than I spend on Facebook doing anything.
That's just my personal $0.02, FWIW.
Posted by: thekohser
That's just my personal $0.02, FWIW.
Strange, that's also about the pay-per-click rate on most AdSense ads nowadays, too.