Wetpaint raises $9.5M for consumer wikis, meanwhile Jot is absent

January 9, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

wetpaintlogo.bmpWetpaint, the Seattle start-up that lets people build Wikis — or sites where multiple people can edit the same pages — has raised $9.5 million to grab more market share.

The move comes after Google bought popular Wiki site, Jotspot, last year and closed that company to new users. VentureBeat tried out various Wikis last year, and found Jotspot the most intuitive. Wetpaint is easy to use, but we didn’t like the loud advertising present on the site — so passed on using it. But with Jotspot gone for now (presumably, Google will relaunch it in some fashion), and players like Socialtext increasingly focused on selling its wiki software to company users, Wetpaint is among the more convenient Wiki softwares for individual projects.

The question is whether $9.5 million is really necessary for a software that is so cheap to make and distribute. It had already raised $5.25 million (past coverage here).

Wetpaint told VentureBeat its users have generated more than 150,000 Wikis in six months, and that the company has struck partnerships with big media companies. AOL, ABC, CBS, American Express Publishing, T-Mobile and HTC have created community sites for their active users, though it’s uncertain how lucrative these deals will be.

Accel Partners, backers of Facebook and Glam, two other sites that rely on advertising for their business model, led the new investment. Existing investors Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures joined the investment.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I really like Wetpaint, but never considered it a project-oriented collaboration tool.  It's more oriented towards community creation - in fact for that purpose it's the friendliest platform avaialable today.  Business -even small projects -  requires a few additional features like document handling (attachments, version control..etc), email integration ..etc. 

    JotSpot was quite good for that, too bad it's gone. Socialtext used to be quite ugly, but the new UI is quite nice - it misses a few features though.  The new kid on the block is  Zoho's Wiki , with quite a few features for an initial beta release. It already supports embedding documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos..etc, and with improved integration to the full Zoho suite later this year it will be a killer combination.
  • Just a quick plug for PBWiki, the little company that could in which I'm an investor:

    While WetPaint gets plenty of press, notice that PBWiki, which is spending a fraction of the money, is holding steady at double the traffic of WetPaint:

    http://www.alexaholic.com/pbwiki.com+wetpaint.com
  • Another quick plug for Sampa (I'm the founder). We are not a Wiki play, but you pretty much can do everything that you can do with Wetpaint and PBWiki, including a whole bunch of other things.

    Sampa is a site/blog service. We are also running on a shoestring budget.

    Check it out: http://www.sampa.com
  • Congratulations, Ben, spend it wisely!

    All the best,
    John Blossom
    President
    Shore Communications Inc.
  • Bess
    This is why Peanut Butter is found everywhere in Silicon Valley.
  • Blimey - As it's mention my company day, I have one more to add

    http://mailspaces.com

    Wiki/group/self-generating portal/auto-tagging/RSS in-out

    We take all of a community's knowledge, however generated, and keep it in one place, so you haven't got the problem of having siloed applications.

    Perhaps most importantly, we "read" everything, automatically linking and tagging it, so if you get an e-mail that relates to something in the wiki, you get a hyperlink through to it, automatically.

    This enables us to build a full community portal, which self updates, based on the content of what is going on in the community, through mail, wiki or feeds

    It allows users to get content out the way they want it - Just want to know the new topics that are cropping up? Subscribe to the RSS feed. Want to see who was spoken about last week, and what the updates wiki entries are? Get an "intelligent" newsletter.

    All the best


    Nigel Cannings
    MD - mailspaces.com