HubPages.com has a similar business it appears as Google Knol. The idea is to create a hub on a topic. Hubs are content aggregation points that link to resources, contain videos and images, original content and comments from the community.
87% of our roughly 5 million monthly visitors come from search results. I suspect WikiPedia gets similar percentage of its traffic from search.
We’ve found three key components in this business. First is community. With many people writing on different topics, there needs to be a common ground for the good community members to participate together, even though they may write about different topics. Second is the promise of money. There is a huge range in how well content monetizes. Unfortunately, the best content doesn’t make the most money - part of this is a function of AdSense. For authors that care about revenue, it is similar to blogging in that it’s important to create content regularly to make a portfolio of content that spreads the risk around. With the right kinds of content, and enough posts, we see authors earn over $2K per month. The third component is moderation of content. Porn and spam can take over a site and put off quality participants. When we made the decision in July of 2007 to eliminate porn and add spam filters, our traffic decreased 40%. If unique visitors are the measure of success in this business, some competitors will be larger, but the ultimate damage to community and advertiser relationships can be significant. It will be interesting to see how Google handles these issues.
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