Gil Penchina, CEO, Wikia, Inc. gave a talk today called Successful Open Communities on the Internet which was one of the most exciting things for me personally that I've seen yet. Not because he was saying anything new, but because finally someone has the same perspective on communities that we've been pushing with Metroblogging. I'll get to that connection after the jump.

The initial part of his talk was just about communities in general and wikis in particular and how they found that with open communities "transparency is more important than privacy." He talked about what they are doing with search.wikia.com where they are making the search algorithms transparent and auditable, and allowing humans to fix the results when the machines are wrong. It's a pretty drastic change for search since until this point the idea has always been that machine based algorithms are king, and it's just a matter of who has the best ones. Obviously people can spot the scams and SEO much better and quicker so it will be interesting to see where that leads.

When asked what the business plan is he pointed out that the business plan is that they spend zero dollars on advertising, zero dollars on marketing, zero on software (open source) and 50,000 pages of content are being added a month. There is almost zero overhead for the sites which makes perfect business sense when combined with advertising.

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So on the topic of user created content someone posed the question that always comes up - are you now or are you planning to pay the authors? They are not. But it's not that simple. And this is the part that really struck a cord with me. At Metroblogging all of our authors are volunteer. Thats been the case since day one and I've talked about it on several occasions. We feel that when people are paid to create content, the quality goes down because they are shifting to being employees rather than members of a community. The difference between a post you write about something you are genuinely interested in and a post you are making to get a paycheck is extremely noticeable. We've always said we'd rather have posts by people who are actually interested in and have some emotional connection to the thing they are writing about. Obviously you can't remove quantity from the equation all together because then you'd have nothing to look at, but with some blog networks requiring their authors to make X number of posts a day in order to get paid $X amount at the end of the month, well, we'd rather have fewer posts by more people that are not just filler. Gil was the first person outside of our group I've seen who came to the same conclusion.

Back to his take - "Paying people screws up the culture" - compensation makes the content crappy because people do just enough to get paid where as when it's all volunteer people only post about things they are actually interested in. Paying a few people pisses off the people who aren't being paid and can kill the community so when you are dealing with user generated content it's all or nothing - paying a few people for their content is much more dangerous than paying no one, and when dealing with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of contributors there isn't a payment model that actually makes sense on any level. That's not to say they aren't trying - they tried something to let people take the software and set up their own wikis to get a share of the advertising, the thought being if you create this community then you can share in revenues, but they quickly found most people prefer to stay with the main system (established community) rather than set up their own (get paid). This shows that the Magic is the community, not the software.

This idea of open serving allows rather than just one wiki based sports magazine, there could be 50 sports magazines that all have a slightly different slant and their own community, and wikia would make cash off all of them. Someone asked if at that point they'd be more of an advertising broker than a content provider. Gil said that if that happens they will not turn into an advertising company, but rather that they would just partner with someone like FM and allow them to sell the inventory so Wikia could continue to focus on the content.