Business wiki AboutUs lands $2.5 million from Voyager Capital

Portland-based AboutUs, which today is announcing a $2.5 million venture round from Voyager Capital, has something going for it that many Internet startups can only dream of.  Last year, the 3-year-old business wiki turned a profit, generating revenue through online advertising and consulting services.

You heard that right. A startup is actually making money through online advertising.

How does AboutUs do it? The company attracts seven million unique visitors per month to its vast network of business pages, each of which is set up as a wiki where individuals can make changes to the content or design. (Zillow.com, one of the largest Seattle Internet startups, attracts about 5.4 million unique visitors by comparison.) 

You can think of AboutUs as a Wikipedia for businesses, though Chief Executive Ray King balks a bit at the comparison. That's because the long-term mission of AboutUs is to be much more than an encyclopedic information source.

Eventually, King sees the company evolving into a collaborative work space where people with similar interests can exchange ideas. It also wants to connect sites that are topically similar, so people can discover more information or people.

"Our purpose is transform the way people work together, that is our long-term goal," said King. "When I saw the first wiki years ago, I was moved because I saw immediately that this was going to change the way I worked in the world."

As an example of how AboutUs works, check out the TechFlash.com page here. I started editing the page on December 11 and promptly forgot about it until my interview with Chief Executive Ray King this week. When I returned to the page, contributors had added all sorts of bells and whistles. Now, you can find a detailed description of TechFlash, biographies, photos and contact details. AboutUs has about 12 million pages of content on the site.

The startup also is eating its own dog food, as they say in the VC circles. When the company started, it built the framework of the business entirely on the public wiki so all shareholder meetings and other corporate details were available publicly.

In addition to online text ads from Google and other ad networks, AboutUs derives revenue from a consulting business where businesses pay $197 to get assistance in designing the wiki pages.

"We are supporting ourselves through advertising right now, it is true," said King, who previously founded domain name operator SnapNames. "But that is not our long-term vision. Our long-term vision is about connecting folks."

There are a few major business directories, including D&B and Hoovers. But King said they are different because most of the information exists behind a subscription wall.

"They could be competitors at some point in the future, but they would have to retool their model quite a bit. Our business model is different enough that I think our business is going to work very differently," he said. "The way in which we generate the information I think is going to be very different because we ultimately want it to be community generated and we also want it to be freely licensed." 

As a result of the investment, Voyager Capital's Erik Benson is joining the board. The company has raised a total of about $5 million from angel investors and venture capital firms. It employs 32 people, with plans to grow to 50 workers globally by the end of the year.