Home
Starting Up
Case Studies DB
Products
Ideas DB
Vibe Coding Tools
Subscribe to IH+
Starting Up
Case Studies
Ideas DB
Products DB
Sign in
Join
7
Likes
10
Comments
Wikipedia is losing money to Big Tech, so it's building an enterprise product
by
rmondo
https://thehustle.co/03182021-big-tech-loves-wikipedia
Heard it this morning and felt it was long overdue; Initial versions of Siri were just WikiPedia parsed by WolframAlpha. A negligible fraction of those Trillions to WikiMedia can surely make the world a better place.
The opportunity for entrepreneurs is to produce specialized APIs that will compete with their enterprise API
Who will use that?
Students, researchers, app developers, data analysts, etc. They publish a lot of data which can be published in JSON for software to use. In my project (boostlane.com) I use their definitions to build a dictionary for my AI. I check for changes every 6 months. Wikipedia can teach AI about the attributes and meaning of words. It's also great for finding information about famous people.
Wikipedia is providing periodic dumps of its content for free. Why would you need an (paid) API?
If the API saves you from processing and cleaning up the data yourself or having to wait for the next release it can be worth it.
Some people don't want to spend time processing and cleaning up data. People make money from APIs that use Google's XML reports that are also available for free.
Also the data can be enriched with data from another source, making the API a unique source of data. It's for the same reason you go to a bar to buy a cocktail instead of making it in your kitchen.
I doubt if this is going to work as a business model because the market seems pretty small.
But I've been wrong before :-)
It depends on the demand you can find of course... Sometimes something very simple can be popular and make enough money.
This reminds me of the drama google is having with news companies because google posts news snippets in the search results rather than directing people to the actual news sites.
Now I will probably have a different perspective when I get those Wikipedia notices asking for donations. Hopefully they don't mess around with ads soon!