Another day, another paid wiki. That was my original reaction to this review request. From the same people that brought you the Five Dollar Wiki and the One Buck Wiki comes yet another paid wiki site and this time, it’s even cheaper. If you can’t afford to pay a full dollar for a wiki page, then you might want to consider the Quarter Wiki. You can probably guess where this is going.
Is Really a Quarter?
The Million Dollar Wiki sold each page for a hundred dollars. The Five Dollar Wiki started out selling its pages for five dollars each, but this price rises quickly with every 1000 pages sold. A similar scheme was implemented at the One Buck Wiki, except the first 999 pages were sold for — you guessed it — a buck.
The Quarter Wiki does not make use of this escalating price scheme, instead selling all of its pages for just a quarter. They guarantee that the site will stay alive for at least fifteen years, meaning that each year will cost you less than 2 cents. You’d be hard-pressed to find a cheaper paid wiki site.
Extra Features
The provided FAQ and purchase page already tell you about why you should purchase a wiki page, so I’m not going to do that. The Quarter Wiki is fundamentally identical to every other paid wiki site on the net, but the developers have tossed in some extra features that might entice you even more than the 25 cent asking price.
When you hop over to the QuickStart Guide (which is a good idea, in and of itself), you’ll discover that this paid wiki allows you to embed videos, integrate RSS feeds, implement Google ads, and even include frames that will display full websites within your paid wiki page. I imagine that many future Quarter Wiki pages will get very spammy with flashing animations and frames all over the place. Implemented properly, however, these pages could prove to be real money-makers.
Instead of a list of categories, The Quarter Wiki features a category cloud, not unlike the tag clouds you find on many blogs. Another added bonus is the user list. Each person who purchases a page gets their own user page to further promote products, services, websites, and so on.
193 Pages Sold And Counting
When I wrote the review, The Quarter Wiki had sold a total of 193 pages to date. With some quick math, this works out to $48.25. If these guys want to make money with this site, they’re going to have to sell a heck of a lot more pages. Don’t forget that a paid review on John Chow dot Com goes for $400; they need to sell 1,600 pages just to cover the cost of this review! If you’re wondering, the page for “Johnchow” (one word) has already been purchased, but not “John Chow” (two words).
In wiki we trust? Seeing how this is (at least) the third paid wiki site from the same team of guys, they must really trust the power of the wiki. The “buy a quarter page” is worded poorly, though, because it makes me think that I’m going buying 25% of a page.
How Much Cheaper Can It Get?
The Million Dollar Wiki and the Million Euro Wiki both sell pages for $100 each. Many people thought that the price was too high and that’s where sites like the Five Dollar Wiki and One Buck Wiki came into play. Now that they’ve pushed the price down to just 25 cents, you’ve got to wonder if the developers are simply cannabalizing their own sales. Why would someone buy a five dollar page when they can spend the same amount of money and buy 20 pages on The Quarter Wiki?
Knowing them, they’ll probably come out with yet another paid wiki site in a couple of months. Can the One Penny Wiki be far behind?
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