Wikipedia is one of the most trusted resources on the web almost for any topic. PaidWiki is a new service that is recently launched with one difference - the individual pages are sold to the owner for $49. For example you own a page for a topic like “Computer Programming” by paying the paidwiki $49. You can publish the content on the page about that topic. You will then own that page and control 50% of the ad inventory on that page. In addition to the advertisements revenue you can earn more by referrals to their service. When a page is created by your referral you earn $23.

The success of this service will depend on the number of pages going to be created. If there are not enough people who are interested to own pages, then this model will not work. But $49 seems to be appealing and there is a great chance that there will be enough pages created. The natural search engine traffic leading to the pages is crucial to earn some bucks from your page ads.

They could have chosen a different name for the service. At least for me, I think the domain name( or service name ) is not that appealing for the pages when they are listed on search results. For any individual topic if the page is getting displayed in the first 10 results of any search engine then that will definitely lead some real traffic to the page. Only time will tell whether this model will work or not in the real time.