Wikia meltdown: layoffs, ...the numbers don't look promising either.... Options

[the fieryangel]

Or so sez Valleywag :

A source who has seen Wikia's numbers says the company is experiencing "a hemorrhaging of cash circa 1999" — losses, in other words, like the first generation of dotcoms.

Everybody's doing layoffs these days, but venture capital is becoming scarce....It's probably not a good sign.

Jimbo really needs to have some professional stills done by a good photographer and ditch these candid shots. The one on this article is particularly bad.

[Somey]

Traffic numbers for the search engine seem to be heading in the right direction, but by now it should be clear that having a business model that depends solely on Google Ads will prove insufficient for many startups to weather the ongoing financial storm and pending recession.

It should be clear?

Wikia's Alexa ranking seems to be hovering around the low 300's lately, which is pretty good considering the competition, but pretty bad considering that they had to raise $14 million to get there. You'd think that with $14 million they could have hired someone to come up with an idea for an product that people would actually pay for, but maybe that's asking a bit much for a mere $14 million...

Today is supposed to be the Big Day when Uncyclopedia's URL's are all redirected to uncyclopedia.wikia.com. I'm guessing that they're all crossing their fingers in the hopes that this will push their ranking up into the 200's, which might work if they start promoting Uncyclopedia a bit more - there's plenty of quality content there if you know where to look. (A number of Uncyc users tried very hard to convince them to redirect it to "fuck.wikia.com" instead, but with little success.)

I should probably restate my own position that aside from the top-level management, I have nothing against Wikia as a website, or even as a business entity, and of course I wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to Uncyclopedia, such as a fire, earthquake, hurricane, or meteor strike.

Moreover, our very own LessHorrid vanU (at least I assume it's him) has written an article about WR there, which looks like it has a much better chance of survival than the last attempt, which IIRC was deleted within the first 6 hours. This one has already lasted 4 days, though that may only be because Dave Gerard hasn't logged in recently.

Don't all go and vandalize it at once...