Knol - (un)cool name for an old concept?
Posted on December 14, 2007 by Martin Zagorsek
Yesterday a post on Google’s blog announced Knol, a new service they’ve begun beta testing. While most of the ensuing blog commentary focused on the service’s similarities to wikipedia, what’s more notable are the differences.
The other difference is the presence of ads on the pages. This is pretty obvious, since the only reason Google would want to get into something like this is to provide yet another venue where it can monetize traffic. Just think of all those millions of wikipedia pageviews with no ads, how wasteful! The inclusion of ads will be up to the author of a given page, but in order to encourage inclusion, Google will share revenue from the ads (no mention of percentages yet).
Not that different from AdSense at first glance, but the fact that they’re providing the entire content platform makes a big difference. While setting up a blog has become almost trivially easy, there are presumably many people out there who just want to write content without any management overhead whatsoever. Associated Content was one of the first to provide such an offering and have amassed millions of pages of content, though they only pay a flat $1.50 CPM rather than the pure revenue share Knol is promising. Given Google’s brand and knack for cross-promoting its tools, they’ll likely do much better, and you can be sure those pages will be well-represented in its search results.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Content Disaggregation, Social Networking
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