“We’re injecting Wetpaint functionality into Web sites, so anyone can contribute and add content on the page,” said Kevin Flaherty, vice president of marketing and a cofounder of Wetpaint.
Without the embedded functionality, Wetpaint customers had to create a new page to let people use the wiki capabilities.
Site visitors who add content are actually adding it directly on the site, so search engines will see it, possibly driving more traffic to the site. That’s different from some other technologies for user-added content, such as Widgets, that search engines might not associate with the site.
With Wetpaint’s code built right into a site, any content created by customers will be picked up by search engines, potentially driving more traffic to the site, said Flaherty.
The most logical sites to use the capability may be companies that already publish content, although Flaherty envisions use cases for essentially any company that wants to communicate with customers.
The capability doesn’t go live until Monday, when a few sites including Flixster, IGN.com and NuWire Investors will start using it.
Sites will typically allow registered users to create pages and content for the site. An example of how Flixster plans to use it is by allowing users to add to a chart that compares the comic book version of Speed Racer with the recent movie.
Adding the wiki technology to a page involves dropping in a couple of snippets of code into the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) behind the site, said Flaherty. From there, Web sites can further customize the look of the page and the functionality. Wetpaint Injected is free for as many as 100,000 impressions per month. Sites with more traffic pay Wetpaint on a revenue-share or impression basis.
Wetpaint doesn’t imagine that its wiki technology will overtake blogs or forums as a way for Web users to communicate with each other online. “Each serves its own purpose,” said Flaherty.
Wetpaint also plans to announce on Monday that it has raised US$25 million in new funding.
