This past week I found a new “pay wiki” site, OneBuckWiki, who’s offering pages for $1 (until 1000 pages are sold, then it goes up to $10).
While this is a new concept for me*, I do see the potential. But only as long as it is moderated, page owners offer valuable content (more than just ads and a bunch of videos or simple iframe inclusions of existing web pages, as those won’t be taken quite as seriously and will drive people away from the site instead of taking the time to look around), visitors continue to come well after the buzz has died down (and people have moved on to a “clone”) AND people are still willing to buy pages after it goes beyond $1…$10?, $20?, what about $100?.
But for a one time $1 payment I guess there’s not really a whole lot to lose. If you get any site traffic from it, it’s well worth the investment, right (as long as your page rank isn’t penalized for some reason, say if the “powers that be” don’t like the concept)?
Anyway, we went ahead and purchased a few pages to help promote Watershed Studio and Surge Bucket Media. (So far we’ve only had a chance to add content for the weird news page which promotes Squirrel Dish, Utter Oddcast and Utter Oddness.) We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully it’ll turn out to be worth the investment.
* Side note, it does seem somewhat like what you can do with Squidoo (for free), but you have a whole lot more control over the content (which may or may not be a good thing depending upon the design knowledge of the page owners…that could be a decent business service though, probably under the guise of SEO).