Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Two people challenging a $28 billion industry

eHub did a nice interview with Paul Youlten, the founder of a great project called Yellowikis. Yellowikis, as Paul put it, is "the 10 month old love-child of Yellow Pages and Wikipedia".

Putting the Yellow Pages online has been tried before but I don't know if any of those projects really took off. Yellowikis' new approach makes this new attempt really promising. I hope they will succeed, especially because of their care for developing countries and their wish to help facilitate trade in those countries.

It seems like Yellowikis is operated very leanly. Asked about traffic, Paul replied:
We don’t take advertising so I didn’t pay for the stats package provided by our hosting company.

He also said:
I got an email from a management consultant that said: “Unless you are in government development, why provide business information for free?” Clearly some people still don’t get that the rules have changed. It’s quite easy for two people with $75 dollars and a few hours hard work to challenge a $28bn industry (Yellow Pages) without any ambition to make a fast buck.

I can hear those industry's people mumble "asymmetrical warfare".

2 comments:

burtonator said...

Their traffic is just ok...

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=6m&y=r&u=yellowikis.org

if they can sustain that they'll be golden but I suspect it's just a spike.

There's so much free analytics software right now there's no excuse . :)

Kevin

Christoph Janz said...

Thanks for your comment, Kevin. Yes, this could be only a spike and the absolute numbers are still low, but let's see how it looks like in a few weeks and months. I really wish them success.