I was intrigued to read on the Million Dollar Wiki blog today that the founder, Graham Langdon, has made the decision to drop out of college at UConn to devote his full attention to building his site. The Million Dollar Wiki is a site that is selling wiki pages by topic… currently at a rate of $100 per page. I have personally picked up three and am working on how I want to develop and monetize them. The pages are guaranteed to stay online for a minimum of 15 years. Graham’s goal is to reach 10,000 pages sold for a minimum of $1,000,000. He is certainly on his way.

Graham has achieved a tremendous amount of success in a short period of time by selling 400 wiki pages ($40,000 worth) since the site launched May 29, 2007. The number of pages Graham is selling continues to climb to where he says he is now selling 10-70 a day. Leaving college certainly takes guts and Graham attributes his decision to a fortune cookie.

Now I’ll be completely honest, this does seem premature to me. If I were in his shoes, which I’m not so take my opinion with a grain of salt, I would definitely wait until the idea was much more proven to have staying power. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great idea and could make him a lot of money and he could always go back to school after this adventure is completed. But the successful college dropouts like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison had a much bigger potential empire than one website with a unique take on an existing idea.

Supposing Graham reaches his target of one million dollars within the next year or two, he could live off a small percentage and invest it wisely and continue to develop new web properties and be just fine. I hope he continues to have great success with Million Dollar Wiki and that he finds a way to earn a residual long-term income from it.

[tags]million dollar wiki, Graham Langdon, college dropout, shaun carter, bill gates, michael dell, steve jobs, larry ellison, website, idea, startup, entrepreneur, investment[/tags]