Wikia turns a profit, thanks in part to WoWWiki

by Alex Ziebart on Sep.11, 2009, under 70000, cooking-wiki, making-money, money, pages, profit, reports, twilight, user-generated-content, wall-street-journal, wiki, wikia, world-of-warcraft, wowwiki

Wikia has been doing a little bit of press lately -- they're the for-profit company that has spun off of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation that runs the huge Wikipedia website. Wikia has announced, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, that they've hit profit early. While they didn't expect to actually make any money running ads next to user-generated content until next year, they've actually made some money this year already. They credit the growth of all of their miniwiki sites, which has expanded greatly over the last year.

So why are we reporting all of this here? You may have already guessed: one of their largest sites, if not the largest, is the World of Warcraft-related wiki, WoWWiki (which we definitely read and use here at WoW.com all the time). WoWWiki is mentioned in a few reports as having 70,000 pages (almost 1/3 more than the next-biggest site in the network, a cooking wiki). In fact, at least one reports credits WoWWiki, along with the Twilight-related wiki, for the growth entirely. We're not sure how much of a part they actually played in the new reported profits, but they are definitely growing, and are a terrific resource for those of us in the WoW community.

Filed under: Fan stuff, Odds and ends, Lore, NPCs, Making money