Another wiki company gets funded

Wikia raised $4 million in series A funding. It’s not a huge amount but it’s a start. Wetpaint raised $5.25 million late last year, which means there are now four venture-backed companies in the market.

Still, is there a market there? The Seattle PI quotes Philip Evans of Boston Consulting Group saying “Almost by definition, there isn’t a business making wikis, because they get made by the users. You could sell wiki software, but there is so much of that around for free that you would be hard-pressed to make a business out of that.”

It’s a good point. Wikis are cool because they’re so simple. A lot of what gets done these days in expensive groupware or content management systems can really be handled by a wiki. Venture money is used, in part, to develop product functionality. But the more bells and whistles you add to a wiki, the more it gets to look like a complicated content management system.

And there are more than 300 open-source wikis out there, which makes getting started in the commercial market a challenge. I guess we’ll know soon, but this looks like a low-dollar proposition to me.

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