Wiki sites share ad revenue with editors

July 2, 2006

In what may be the first wiki sites to do so, two websites have (independently) begun to offer ad revenue sharing to their wiki contributors.

Wikitysplit.com began its site on March 15, 2006.1

Another website, Allyourideas.com, which had been existence since September 4, 2005, began its ad revenue sharing on March 31, 2006, having started its ad sharing independently and without knowledge of the former site.

Both sites allow creators of wiki pages to get a potential share of the site's ad revenue. AllYourIdeas.com also offers editors of others' pages the chance to make money from their edits.

The present compensation system listed at these sites is as follows. Wikitysplit states it will add ads 50% of the time to be credited to the original author, whereas AllYourIdeas only offers them 35% of the time. However, AllYourIdeas will credit the remaining 65% of the credit to the most frequent editor of the page (which, of course, in the beginning at least, will be its creator).4 (The site owner of the latter states that he always obtains revenues for one of the other ads on the pages.)

Allyourideas.com also offers a means on each relevant page for Paypal donations to be received by the site founder and most frequent editor.

Revenue sharing has become a popular means for businesses to gain visitors to their sites. Google is famous for widening this possibility for individual site owners with its Adsense program, and later opening it up to blogs in conjunction with Blogger.com. Later, a number of forums eventually began to offer this chance for revenue to their own contributors, starting with Digitalpoint.4