At Wikia we are announcing this week the launch of HP MagCloud print-on-demand for Wikia users. The concept here is simple but powerful: let communities create magazines from their work seamlessly.

We have no idea how popular this is going to be at first, but I see the potential for a huge future here.

Recently, Conde Nast announced the closure of Gourmet Magazine. What happened there? It’s really very very simple: the traditional magazine has not kept pace with the needs of readers or advertisers. It isn’t that reading is going out of style – quite the opposite. It isn’t that people don’t care about quality – quite the opposite. The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster.

Take a look at the web traffic rankings (according to Quantcast) of Gourmet Magazine’s site and Wikia’s recipes site.

October 21st Quantcast rank for Gourmet Magazine

October 21st Quantcast rank for recipes.wikia.com

How did this happen? How did a Recipes wiki become more popular than one of the most famous food magazines?

It’s because Gourmet offered a handful of recipes and articles per month, while Recipes offers literally thoughts of recipes on-demand anytime anyone wants.

But there still *is* value in the paper form-factor and there still *is* value in carefully selected “best of” content, delivered on a per-issue or subscription basis: and that’s where the MagCloud/Wikia partnership comes in.

Communities can now produce print magazines of higher quality, and of a more timely and customized nature than traditional print magazines can. YOU can publish your own cooking magazine or cookbook on Wikia. (Make one for your family, with all your great grandmother’s favorite recipes?)

I predict that this could end up having a huge impact on dozens of titles.  How soon will car magazines be replaced by our auto wikis?

I’d like to hire the former publisher of Gourmet Magazine – and the publishers of many more magazines, because I think they will be valuable assets at a company which knows where the world is heading.

It won’t happen overnight.  But the growth of Wikia appears to be on a trajectory as overwhelming and consistent as what Wikipedia experienced.

As Clay Shirky put it in the title of his book, “Here Comes Everybody”. 

Wow, coming on the heels of the great news I got yesterday about our Comscore numbers…

W00t!

Just for fun, here’s a comparison of Wikia (all sites) with Mahalo (all sites).  Some of you may know that Jason Calacanis enjoys poking at me and not long ago made a bit of a stir in the blogosphere by calling me a poser and saying I’m not a real entrepreneur.  Who’s posing now, Jason?  (Actually I love and respect Jason, even if he does like to talk trash, and had a nice visit with him at Mahalo not long ago, so this is all in fun.  But I dare you tweet this blog post, Jason… ;-) )

Wikia vs Mahalo

Note: the above are screenshots, you can see the live numbers for Wikia stats as well!