We know the old bait-and-switch formula employed by “community” websites: offer free publishing with no ads, watch the pageviews climb into the millions, sell the domain for millions of dollars. The eager and optimistic contributors that worked on your website for months without pay will be left empty-handed, and consequently the content that they contributed benevolently will be surrounded by blinking advertisements.

The demand for their output is already phenomenal: Wikipedia, which started in 2001, will notch up around 2.5 billion page impressions this month. According to Mr Wales, its traffic volumes are doubling every four months.

The combination of ultra-low overheads and massive readership would excite any media executive. And while the site does not carry any advertising, Wales admits it might. “There is a great deal of resistance to the idea, both from the community and from me. But at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down,” he says.

If this happens, there’s a good possibility that many Wikipedia contributors will abandon the site, but that won’t matter much–the content is already there to advertise on. This happens again and again. Unless you know the webmaster personally, don’t bother contributing your time to a “user generated media” website that will sell your efforts collectively to the highest bidder. If all of your content is on my domain, why wouldn’t I sell it for millions of dollars? So why do so many people spend time contributing to an online “user generated media” community when there is so little to gain? The answer seems obvious to me, but maybe it’s not so obvious.

If you would like to manage and profit from your own content, there might be some obstacles:

1. Maybe you are not aware that you can host your own content.
2. Maybe you don’t know where to start.
3. Choosing and paying for web hosting might seem intimidating.
4. Registering a domain name might seem intimidating.
5. You don’t know which web publishing software application to choose.
6. If you did choose, you might not know how to use the software.
7. Maybe you don’t know what to write about.
8. Maybe you don’t have a strategy.
9. If you do have a strategy, you’re not sure if it will work.
10. You don’t know how you will measure your success.

Maybe it’s not so easy after all, and maybe that is why so many people fall into the “user generated media” trap. It might seem intimidating, but I think it’s worth it. Think of the entire internet as the community. You are a writer. Everything that you write can be accessed by everyone else, and that will be the case for as long as your content is on the web. When you are in control of your content, you determine how your content is presented. When you are in control of your content, you can make money from it.

It’s also worth mentioning, and I wouldn’t recommend this (you could get a “duplicate content penalty” in the search engines) but it looks like you can already copy Wikipedia’s content and drop in your own advertisements. Apparently there are already websites doing this:

From “AusDaddy” in WebmasterWorld’s Google Adsense forum:

If you want to use content from wikipedia, that is OK. In fact they encourage it. Just don’t scrape the content as that wastes bandwidth and makes them grumpy. The proper way to do it is to download a database dump of their content. This is easier for your and cheaper for the Wiki so everyone gains.