Andrei's Blog

Crowed-sourced maps are all the rage these days, but back in 2006 it was only OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia (at least, they were the most-known). Unlike OpenStreetMap which has been getting a ton of publicity, Wikimapia is flying under the radar. Several weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Wikimapia founders Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev to get an update on the project’s status.

For those not familiar with the project – Wikimapia is a wiki for maps. As with any other wiki, Wikimapia allows users to annotate features on the map, add points of interest and more. When compared to OpenStreetMap, the main difference is that Wikimapia users are not limited in what they can add to the map. In addition, all user-contributed features are presented as clickable overlays and not “baked” into the actual map tiles. Another more subtle difference is in the ownership of the contributed data: Wikimapia’s data is exclusively captured (traced) from Google Maps and therefore owned by Google and its data providers (personal observation).

The project was launched in 2006 and, as Wikipedia states, has over has over 11M places and well over 600K registered users. According to Saveliev, the website gets close to 1M unique visitors per day. I wasn’t able to confirm those numbers on Compete, Alexa or Quntcast. In any case, enough of Wikimapia’s visitors click on AdSense ads to support a staff of eight full-time employees, including two founders, and make the company profitable.

Contrary to some rumors, Koriakine and Saveliev never raised outside capital and were able to bootstrap their way to profitability. As of right now 100% of company’s revenue is derived from advertisement, but Wikimapia plans to develop additional revenue streams and products in the near future.

I was surprised to learn that despite the surge of location technologies, Wikimapia hasn’t seen much M&A interest. Part of the reason might be Wikimapia’s reliance on Google. In addition to the data ownership issues mentioned above, Wikimapia’s technology is tightly coupled with Google Maps API making it difficult for non-Google-centric companies to take over. Another reason might be that simply not enough people outside Russia (and India) know about the project.

Although Koriakine and Saveliev are not opposed to the idea of selling Wikimapia, they are not actively pursuing it. Instead, they are focusing most of their attention on growing the business. The environment today is a lot different from what it was back in 2006, and the company has to face pressure from Google, Yandex and OpenStreetMap. So far, Koriakine and Saveliev have been able to build a successful business, and it will be interesting to see how they address the challenges ahead. One thing is certain, we’ll be hearing more about Wikimapia in the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 5:10 pm and is filed under General, Geo, Maps, Russia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.