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A little over a month ago I donated a business idea to the Business Idea of the Day and they donated a $400 laptop in my name. The idea that I donated was that someone should make a free online reference (Wikipedia competitor) that ran on a few small advertisements rather than donations. Unlike Wikipedia, the site idea would be for-profit, and would share 60% of the revenue with 6 of the writers per page. This would net 40% revenue from the ads on every single page of the website. Writers would be inclined to write and research the pages because they would get a profit from it.

Well I was not surprised when someone decided to take up my idea, although I did NOT expect it to be the Google team themselves! Google recently introduced Google Knol. Their definition of “knol” is that it is “a unit of knowledge.” I was quite pleased to see that Google had developed a website dead-on to what I recommended someone develop. I think that revenue sharing websites will be a big thing in 2008-2009 because every web user would love to earn money for doing the things he does anyway (I know I do!).

In one quick sentence for all of you article skimmers:
Google Knol = Squidoo + Wikipedia + Revenue Sharing

Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com made a really good point that when Google purchased Youtube for 1.65 billion dollars, they implemented Youtube videos to rank (and rank well they do!) inside of Google search results, so we can assume that quality Google Knol articles will rank well too, hopefully better than Wikipedia or Squidoo articles.

Now what does this mean for you? Get in the knol! Every article will be solely unique rather than one giant user edited contribution, which means that if you can be the first to write an extremely quality post about “Internet Marketing” “Affiliate Marketing” “Search Engine Optimization”, or “Insert ANY other keyword here!”, you can have the possibility to rank high indefinitely on ALL the search engines. Some companies are spending up to $20 per click on high profile keywords, which you could rank #1 organically for free, and even earn a share of the revenue from the Google adsense that are displayed.

I am pondering on writing some very nice, long, detailed, well researched articles on a few topics so that when they go into public beta, I can be the first to grab the biggest piece of the pie. I recommend you do the same.

Image source: Google (Opens in new window)

If my predictions are right, we can expect this to be big. Authors will have actual proof as to their expertise, and can put their reputation on the line. Authors will be paid to write about what they are experienced with, and webmasters [might] even get dofollow links to rank their sites higher as well, all from the power of their Google Knol articles. I really hope this idea takes off, and if it does, I will be one of the first to be fully promoting it.

Just for laughs, here was my original MSPaint drawing of my idea (before Google Knol was announced). [Yes, I think Google Knol’s picture is a tiny bit better!]

Full Source of my original idea: http://www.wordhugger.com/pedia.html