Fandom (website)

Fandom, Inc.
	Logo since August 2021
Type of business	Subsidiary
Type of site	Wiki hosting service
Available in	Multilingual
Founded	October 18, 2004
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Founder(s)	Jimmy Wales; Angela Beesley Starling;
Key people	Perkins Miller (CEO); Jimmy Wales (President); Brandon Rhea (VP of Community);
Products	Wiki hosting Wiki topic discussion forums; ; Data research; Private focus group and early marketing; API; Digital pop culture news magazine;
Employees	300+ (2016)
Parent	TPG Inc. (2018–present)
Subsidiaries	Comic Vine; Focus Multimedia; GameFAQs; GameSpot; Giant Bomb; Metacritic; Screen Junkies; TV Guide;
URL	fandom.com; wikia.org (redirect); wikia.com (redirect);
Advertising	Direct and advertising networks
Registration	Optional
Users	350 million (as of December 11, 2022)
Launched	October 18, 2004 (wiki hosting service; as Wikicities); January 25, 2016 (Fandom News and Stories);
Current status	Active
Content license	Creative Commons Attribution/; Share-Alike 3.0; Media licensing varies;
Written in	PHP, JavaScript (Node.js)

Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e., video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

Fandom uses MediaWiki, the same open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia. Unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, Fandom, Inc. operates as a for-profit company and derives its income from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. The company also runs the associated Fandom editorial project, offering pop-culture and gaming news. Fandom wikis are hosted under the domain fandom.com, which has become one of the top 50 most visited websites in the world, rapidly rising in popularity beginning in the early 2020s. It ranks as the 50th as of October 2023, with 25.79% of its traffic coming from the United States and followed by Russia with 7.76% according to Similarweb.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.