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Comment by zeroCalories | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.

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> Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.

I run Weird Gloop (the group hosting the Minecraft/RuneScape wikis) and your view is generally correct. The content is extremely cacheable and the infrastructure costs have extremely strong economies-of-scale. The labor costs are a bit less obvious, but past a certain baseline (of, say, having enough people for a reasonable oncall rotation), the marginal labor cost of hosting additional wikis is quite low.

Thanks for hosting the OSRS wiki! It's amazing, out-of-your-face, and just works.

And the osrs wiki is pretty special too imo since there is custom code (like calculators and integrations with RL Plugins). Best wiki I've seen.

Because Fandom is owned by these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc%2e

That's a good point. It's very likely that TPG demands constant growth meaning more profits each year. So Fandom has to put ads everywhere to meet the goals.

> "needs"

What if the monetization is the point, not the content?

If you charge over the market rate you will get undercut by competition? Seems risky to make your site borderline unusable for cash you don't need.

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