Due to the multiple requests for information on how to make money with Wikipedia Review, let me offer this quick tutorial that goes beyond what might be available on the Wikipedia Review Monetizing Wikipedia Review page.

First, you should obtain a free Google AdSense account, and (for additional money-making) obtain an Amazon Associates account. Once you have those, you may use Wikipedia Review as a platform for drawing in traffic to your content.

Write good, unique content about a subject, pimp it out with semantic tags, including keywords that you think people on the Internet will be searching for when they're looking for your kind of content. Then, plunk in your Google AdSense banner code and/or your Amazon Associates links (e.g., why just "cite" a book reference, when you can cite it and include a link to Amazon to purchase the book?) within the body of the article.

With Google AdSense ads, I've found that at least 0.75% of the visitors to the page will click on an ad, in which case, you'll get anywhere from 1 cent to $1.65 from Google, depending on the value of the link context. Or they may click on an Amazon link to the book/movie you're talking about, and if they buy it, you get from 4% to 10% of the retail sale price as commission from Amazon.

Currently, I'm a bit miffed by Google AdSense, though -- they've suspended my account, and it had been making about $35 a month. It's on appeal, so we'll see what happens.

One Wikipedia Review editor is making about $100 a month from the site, though their "content" is nothing more than an RSS news feed generator embedded on a page about any "hot topic" in the news. Frankly, I think that's more work than it's worth, but I like writing, and that editor loathes it. It kind of junks up Wikipedia Review, but it's my site... if someone's making decent sandwich money off it, so be it.


There is also a very quick way that you can earn $15 on Wikipedia Review, right now. All you need to do is write five sentences, cited to two sources. The payment is made either via mailed check or via PayPal.

If I may ask, though, doesn't that essentially give rise to a dichotomy between the individual editor's interests and the interests of you (as the site proprietor), and of editors who would like to contribute actual, substantive content?

What I mean is that the editor you mention is presumably OmniMediaGroup, who appears to be a bit of a machine in creating that sort of page - I don't know what the technical term is (is it a Googlebomb?), but a page with no content other than automatically generated links to bring in the search engine traffic.

I mean, Recent Changes is dominated by her, her contribution history shows that she's created thousands of those pages, and I think in at least one case (this page) she's overwritten substantive content (imported from Wikipedia) with those automatically generated links.

I killed 5 minutes or so hitting Special:Randompage twenty times just to see what the results were.* Of those 20 articles, 10 were OMG pages. By those figures, of the 50,000 pages that I think I saw somewhere as being the current number, 25,000 of those don't actually contain any informative content, they're just there to bring in the traffic, the page impressions, and OMGs $100 a month.

So there's where I think the dichotomy lies - those pages are, by their nature and their number, the ones which will bring in the traffic. The problem is that a random searcher who is looking for actual decent content on someone, and who comes across one of those pages, is, I would think, more likely to go away with an adverse impression of MWB, as they haven't found what they're looking for - almost the opposite, in fact. That then impacts on you, as the brand owner, and other editors who spend time generating substantial, decent, content, as the next time the searcher sees MWB in their Google results they're less likely to click on it because the last time they did they didn't get anything decent in return.

In fact, whilst looking for something else entirely (which I didn't find) I came across your edict that whatever you do, you shouldn't "exploit MWB to such a degree that it diminishes the value of MWB to other users". I guess my question is whether you see what OMG is doing as a problem, or not. I saw somewhere else on your site (but now can't find that either, I'm afraid) that you had some limit whereby someone who was grabbing directory space could only grab a limited number, then had to show that they'd built out half of that with decent content before being able to grab more. That, presumably was designed to maintain content levels, but doesn't seem to be being enforced?

Apologies for how long a question this ended up being...!

*To be strictly accurate, I hit it twenty one times, but I ignored NAICS/51 as that seemed to me to be more administrative than anything else. One of the 20 results was a philosophical, well thought out, beautifully written and carefully crafted piece of prose by User:Wikademia (here) which gave me a headache.

Thank you for viewing 21 pages on Wikipedia Review.

As is the oft-cited Wikipedia mantra, crap found on one page does not change the quality of excellent content found on another page. The OmniMediaGroup crap does bring in web traffic, which helps to raise the domain's Google PageRank. That higher PageRank helps the "serious" editors get their high-quality pages noticed by the search engines.

The OmniMediaGroup situation is not ideal, in my mind, but we tried Centiare.com for over a year without such "crap" in place, and it wasn't getting beyond PageRank of 2/10. The ideal situation would be for the IRS to shut down the Wikimedia Foundation and seize Wikipedia.org, replacing the Main Page with a notice for editors to "Please continue editing on Wikipedia Review.com".

Hoping for the ideal to happen, I'm left with looking for other options. Deleting the 30,000 pages that are bringing in half our traffic is not a good answer.

Uh, yeah. Is it making money for you, Greg? I've never been sure whether this was an actual business of yours or just a hobby.

(And yeah, this thread isn't about what I thought it was about.)

Income for me from the site was nearly exactly offsetting hosting fees. However, the site served as a "calling card" for my other activities surrounding wiki applications, consulting, and paid editing. Income related to that activity is ongoing, but clearly still in the "hobby" category; perhaps 2% of my household's income.

See how much more transparent I am than Jimbo and his secret Lacroix fees?

Good luck with it Greg. I will always support someone with an honest business venture.

I hadn't realised that PageRank was more of a site-wide ranking, rather than a page-by-page ranking. So, if I were to write a new page right now with pretty much any content I wanted, that page would, by virtue of being on MWB, automatically and instantly "inherit" a PageRank of 4 (or 5, I can't recall what it currently stands at)?

On that basis, I see the benefit of the OMG situation from a technical viewpoint, but there's still the downside from the branding viewpoint, that 50% or so of the contents of MWB are "crap" (your word, not mine!), and that someone searching and coming into MWB and hitting such a page might be a bit put off the site.

In terms of options, can you not simply import content wholesale from Wikipedia for pages in those 30,000 which have a matching entry? That was what looked like had happened for one of the pages in the 20 that I hit - Engleby, I think it was. Would there be licensing issues with that? Or would it erode your PageRank?

PageRank is a page-by-page assessment, as far as I can tell. But, I have to also believe that Google is taking into account on search engine algorithms not just the PageRank of the assessed page, but also that of the parent, top-level domain (in this case, 4/10, but it's been as high as 5/10). One of the more popular pages on Wikipedia Review has earned a PageRank of its own of 2/10. A typical new page in Wikipedia Review will begin life as a 0/10 PageRank, but it will quickly get picked up by search engines.

If 70% of 1,000 people are being "put off" by the site, that's 300 pleased visitors, which I believe to be a better situation than only 10% of 200 people being put off by a better site with less traffic (or, 180 pleased visitors).

Importing content from Wikipedia verbatim is generally an adverse proposition, because Google will punish sites with significant quantities of "duplicate content" that can be found elsewhere on the Internet.

One last note -- on any subject that is a legal entity (corporation or living person), where a "crap" article is holding its place; if the subject wants to replace that crap content with their own material, Wikipedia Review policy is to completely facilitate that request, at the expense of the placeholder content. OmniMediaGroup is aware of this policy feature.

I hope that my answers have been helpful to you, and that you'll try Wikipedia Review today!

Yes, very interesting - thanks for taking the time to reply. I haven't got anything to promote, really, but will bear it in mind if and when I do!

Obviously I don't know this for a fact and I could always be wrong, but it stands to reason that Special:Randompage would be clicked less on a smaller wiki than it would be on Wikipedia... same with Recent Changes. Most people are going to get to MWB from Google, and then use the internal search facility from there, won't they? In other words, I doubt that the existence of all those OMG pages acts as a nuisance or annoyance to anyone who's looking for something specific.

It's an interesting problem, but it seems to me the real issue (if there is one) might be opportunity cost - as they do on Wikipedia, people might see the pre-existing article (even if it's largely worthless, a stub, or whatever) and decide it's not worth the trouble and go elsewhere, when they might have posted a better version if that pre-existing article/stub hadn't been in place. (The reason being that they don't want to be rude or get into a fight with the original poster/author.)

Then again, if you're not saying you're an "encyclopedia" to be potentially used as an educational reference, then maybe that's not really something to be concerned about?