| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | St. Petersburg, Florida, United States[citation needed] |
| Key people | Jimmy Wales Tim Shell Michael Davis |
| Revenue | N/A |
| Employees | 10 |
| Website | www.bomis.com |
| Alexa rank | ~60,000 |
| Type of site | Internet portal Advertising space |
| Registration | no |
| Available in | English |
| Launched | 1996 |
| Current status | active |
Bomis (pronounced /ˈbɒmɨs/)[1] is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary business is the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell, and provided support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. As of 2006, Tim Shell is the CEO of Bomis.
On the Bomis.com site, Bomis creates and hosts web rings around search terms popular among male users. The rings are currently categorized broadly as "Babe", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Science fiction", and "Other".[2] The "Adult", "Babe", and "Entertainment" categories are the most frequently updated and the most popular. In addition, Bomis hosts a copy of the Open Directory Project search directory. Revenue from search-related pages is generated from advertising and affiliate marketing.
Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online encyclopedia project Nupedia (now defunct), and its offshoot Wikipedia during that encyclopedia's early years.
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Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated[3] pornographic content.
Until mid-2005, Bomis also featured the Bomis Babe Report, a free blog, publishing news and reviews about celebrities, models, and the adult entertainment industry. The Babe Report prominently linked to Bomis Premium and frequently posted updates about new models joining Bomis. Bomis has also operated nekkid.info, a free repository of selected erotic photographs,[4] and continues to host The Babe Engine, "a precision babe search engine", which indexes photos ranging from glamour photography to pornography.[5]
In addition, Bomis has provided hosting to websites supporting Objectivist and other libertarian political views, including the "Freedom's Nest",[6] a database of books and quotes, and "We the Living", a large objectivist community website which is now defunct.
Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia an idea pioneered by Richard Stallman. Bomis hosted Nupedia in 2000, and Larry Sanger was hired to manage and edit that project. A year into the development of Nupedia, Bomis decided the project was too expensive, and a so called "wiki" was set up as a way to solicit low-cost new drafts for Nupedia.
Wiki as a word, as a concept, and as a software technology for websites that allows multiple users to edit and update a text or program quickly and easily, was an invention of and created and developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. The new online-encyclopedia on base of Ward's wiki-technology, was named Wikipedia and it looked exactly the same as Cunningham's websites. While originally intended as a "feeder" project for Nupedia, Wikipedia—with its much lower barriers to contribution, and its much lower costs for Bomis—rapidly outgrew its parent in size and attention.
For a while, Bomis provided web servers and bandwidth for these projects, paid Sanger in his role as project editor-in-chief (until he left the projects in 2002), and owned key items such as the associated domain names. However, as the costs of Wikipedia rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined as result of the dot-com-crash, a general reluctance to display advertising on the site—together with a desire from the Wikipedia community to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia—suggested an alternative ownership model.
The Wikimedia Foundation was formally announced on June 20, 2003, and all intellectual property and domain name assets were transferred or donated to this non-profit organization. Existing server hardware was not transferred.[7] Larry Sanger had left the project by this time, but Jimmy Wales retains a role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikimedia community. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) primarily through donations from readers. Bomis CEO Tim Shell was the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation until December 2006, when he was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede.
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