UnNews:Wikia to offer "gold membership" for wikis
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| Wikia to offer "gold membership" for wikis | 
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12 February 2013
EVIL WIKIA™ HEADQUARTERS, San Francisco, California -- In order to address the flight from Wikia™ over issues of advertisements, Wikia™ has recently announced an ad-free option. Under the new gold-membership option, a wiki can become ad free in exchange for donations to cover the cost of web hosting.
"We have had many wikis leave over the issue of advertisements," said Jimbo Wales, CEO and evil overlord of Wikia™. "By self-hosting, wikis can avoid any unwanted advertisements. However, self-hosting wiki costs money, and the required donations from the community can be substantial. We believe that there is an untapped market in wikis that are willing to pay the premium for ad free content, yet aren't quite able to navigate the complex web of copyright and libel laws on their own."
"For only $1,500 a year, Wikia™ is willing to host your wiki ad-free, and provide professional staffing. That way you can have an ad-free wiki experience without the ever present threat of the wiki being bankrupted out of existence by mishandled DMCA take down notices," Wales continued. "Wikia™ will place a couple non-obtrusive links your wiki's sidebar to a donation page and the Wikia™ store. Once Wikia™ obtains $1,500 in donations, your wiki will obtain gold membership status, and will be advertisement free for a year. now, suppose interest in your wiki wanes, and you can't pay the $1,500 every year. In that case, your wiki will revert back to regular status until $1,500 in donations is raised. A self-hosted wiki would fold in such conditions, while your Wikia™ wiki merely reverts to an ad-laden status patiently waiting on donations from the community."
Many in the wiki communities are excited about this new option. One anonymous user said, "$1,500 dollars a year in donations isn't that much spread over the whole userbase. In addition, 15% of the proceeds from the Wikia™ store go toward the donation total. I mean, who doesn't want to buy a Wikia™ mousepad for the rock-bottom price of $13.50. And $2 and 2 1/2 cents of that goes toward buying an ad-free wiki. That is enough to buy over 11 hours of an ad-free wiki experience for the whole community."
"Plus, we have the advantage of Wikia™'s professional staff," he continued. "I, for one, would not trust anonymous 'crats with checkuser powers. And I definitely wouldn't want one of us to deal with DMCA takedown notices or libel threats. We'd probably ignore the DMCA notice and tell the complaining to "go fuck off" or something to that effect. Then our webhost would get in all kinds of legal trouble, and our wiki would disappear from the internet.
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This article features first-hand journalism by an UnNews correspondent. |