Yellowikis - A Case Study of a Web 2.0 Business, Part 1

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Just to be clear:

> 1) The issue of gathering sufficient data seems to be a big issue,
> because there isn't a lot of content in Yellowikis at this point. What's
> Yellowikis' strategy to get those 'network effects' happening, like they
> have for Wikipedia (in a big way)?
...The ambition of Yellowikis isn't to be disruptive simply for the sake of being disruptive. Disruption is an effect - not a motive. Ultimately we want to be bigger and better than traditional Yellow Pages. Being better is easy the paper directories produced by traditional Yellow Pages publishers are out of date before they are printed and their internet offerings are crippled by their rigid information architectures. Right from the start we knew we were able to do a lot of things better than the traditional Yellow Pages. We are, or have the potential to be: more up-to-date, more accurate and more comprehensive - in terms of the depth of information we collect and how it is organised. We are flexible and open. Not to mention being multi-lingual and indexable by search engines. However to have real merit, to make a real difference to the way the world does business, Yellowikis must at least match the traditional Yellow Pages publishers in terms of data volume. The ambition is to be absolutely massive. Bigger than all the traditional Yellow Pages directories around the world put together.

So how are we going to get so massive? It would be great if the network effect kicked in - and there are lots of good reasons for companies to add their own information - but I think we would be lucky to get a few hundred thousand entries this way. It could take years and it would mostly be small tech-savvy owner-managed businesses and hotels (who seem to be early adopters of Yellowikis). With no marketing but a very altruistic mission it has taken Wikipedia five years to collect 2.6million articles. We haven't done any marketing (beyond the limited edition t-shirts) and I hope we will never need to. Because one day soon, someone, somewhere will realise that they can make money from adding companies to Yellowikis. As soon as that happens and word spreads among university campuses we will see a huge jump in volume. Dick Larkin from the YPCommando Newsletter gave me the idea. He knows how much money traditional Yellow Pages publishers generate from field sales. He asked me if I had considered setting up such an sales operation. For Dick this is his bread and butter - but for me I just can't imagine any joy in managing a global network of sales people. But Dick had the right idea; the best way to grow and ensure good data quality is to attach dollar signs to the process. But we don't need to employ the sales and editing team directly. All we need to do is to encourage people to sell their wiki editing skills. They can operate as free agents or in small independent groups outside of Yellowikis. Ward Cunningham pointed out to me that the commercial imperitive has worked wonders for eBay - which shares a lot of features with wikis. Last week we added a link from our main page in English asking if anyone wanted to make money from adding companies to Yellowikis. We have got a small group of people interested and will be adding sales tips, pricing guidelines and editing advice to the site as we learn more about how people start using it to make money. We are also talking to a rural development group in India about getting it started there and to a social venture group in London too and there is a student in Poland who is thinking about selling his wiki editing and translation skills to companies in Warsaw. Not so much "Build it and they will come" but "They will pay you for building it".

We like what Amazon are doing with mTurk - and see that as a great model for Yellowikis. Big companies like StarBucks or McDonalds with thousands of outlets might prefer to outsouce the process of adding each branch. Yellowikis would simply acts as an intermediary between big companies and people with editing skills. There is not much point in buying in lists of telephone numbers from Yellow Pages - we aren't a destination site - most people arrive at Yellowikis through Google searches. At some point in the future people might start to come to Yellowikis to do specific searches - but we will have to be pretty big before that to makes sense.

Another thing I like about the idea of students and home workers using Yellowikis as a tool to make extra cash is that it routes round the problem of making the editing process slicker and easier. Infact there is some advantage to having a slightly "hairy" interface. Adding a company to Yellowikis takes time and effort - that is why companies will pay for someone to help them.

2) Tagging and an open API:

Tags: Yellowikis shares its DNA with Wikipedia so our "tags" are called "categories". A typical company listing will belong to three or four different categories. Basic categories include things like Country, USstate, NAICS - (a US government industry code), and geo codes. Last week 4 companies that had attended a particular conference added a category relating to that.

No API: Yellowikis runs on the same MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia. Amazingly isn't a proper API for MediaWiki as such, just a load of code. This is quite well documented and there is an active development community - but an outward looking API would be a good thing to have for Wikipedia as much as Yellowikis. There is something called "pywikipediabot" which can do some API-like things but you need to be quite a skilled PHP hacker to do anything very interesting with it. We have a list of tech development that we need help with and one reason for getting investment would be to allow us to stop depending on volunteer efforts - which are fine but quite erratic and slow.

Posted by: PaulYoulten   Posted on: 11/17/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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