Squidoo
| File:Logo-squidoo18.gif | |
| Company type | Search Engine |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Headquarters | Irvington, NY, USA |
Key people | Seth Godin, Founder. Megan Casey, Editor in Chief |
| Revenue |  Unknown |
Number of employees | 4 |
| Website | www.squidoo.com |
Squidoo is a website designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Advertising revenue is shared with these content creators, and some of it is given to charity. Squidoo was launched in October 2005 by Squidoo.com, LLC based in Irvington, New York; the site came out of beta testing in March 2006.
Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses—single pages that highlight one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and advice then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.
Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions. Squidoo has a Top 100 list by topic, by rank, by group and for Giant lenses. There are about 22 different topics like Health & Medicine, Food & Cooking, Business and many more.
Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters: 5% goes to charity, 50% goes to the lensmasters, and 45% goes to Squidoo. Nearly half of lensmasters donate their royalties to any of 65 featured charities, ranging from NPR and the American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.[citation needed]
Squidoo was founded by Seth Godin. On Godin's founding team was his book editor Megan Casey, former Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr.
See also
- HubPages is a web publishing company with many similarities in business model, internal structure and traffic.
- Knol is one of Google's services which implements the same idea.