| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | July 6, 1995 |
| Headquarters | Glenside and Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Key people | Tom Fulp: Founder & CEO Wade Fulp: Administrator & Public Relations Rob Rosenbaum & James Holloway: Programmers Tim Miller: Sysadmin Will Stamper & Jeff Bandelin: Web and Media Designers Bob Rudderow: HTML + CSS Designer |
| Slogan | "Everything, By Everyone." (Former slogan: "The problems of the future, today!") |
| Website | www.newgrounds.com |
| Type of site | SWF hosting service |
| Registration | Optional (however, many features are disabled without registration) |
| Available in | English |
Newgrounds is an American entertainment and social media website. Founded on July 6, 1995 by Tom Fulp, the site primarily hosts Adobe Flash animations and games, but also features a music-oriented page, along with an art portal. Tom Fulp remains the site's owner and still regularly produces in-house content.
Its offices are headquartered in Glenside, Pennsylvania.[1]
Contents |
The home page of Newgrounds displays recent submissions chosen by administrators as a special showcase of their favorites. On April 21, 2003 the first front page icon for a user-submitted Flash game was posted under the heading "Tom and Wade Recommend." The game that was posted was Taipan 3000[2] by Josh "Psycho Goldfish" Tuttle, a remake of a popular Apple II game called Taipan!.
As Newgrounds received more quality submissions the "Tom and Wade Recommend" section grew from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, and 4 to 6 icons. As of 2009, there are 36 icons on the home page; 12 for Flash animations, 12 for games, 4 for music and 8 for art. The rate at which this page was updated also increased, from weeks to days, eventually leading to the removal of the "Tom and Wade recommend" heading and becoming a staple of the Front Page, making it easy for new users to the site to find quality content.
Originally the icons were created by moderators, as were the long Flash descriptions (the same process used for the collections pages), but this proved to be an extremely time-consuming, tedious task. Currently users are given the ability to attach their own icons with their submissions, and write their own brief descriptions.
On January 12, 2004 the home page archive was launched, keeping a month-by-month list of Flash content that was deemed to be worthy of display on the Newgrounds homepage. This includes either those who performed well in the daily awards, or simply those the admin deemed worthy.
On June 27, 2006, the Icon Helpers system was launched for Newgrounds volunteers to make and submit icons for newer flash content that was lacking an icon, making the integration to automated collections pages much more effective.
On a few occasions, while maintenance has been performed on the site, the home page has been replaced by an "under construction" page showing the Newgrounds tank picture being welded by a programming crew. The image is accompanied by a message describing the work done, such as that displayed during the major update that occurred in July 2007, July 2009, 21 October 2009, June 2010, November/December 2010 and the crash of October 2011: "IN UR TANK, UPGRADING UR SERVERZ :3". The October 2011 crash was believed to be caused by the Homestuck End of Act 5 Flash, hosted on Newgrounds.
The Flash portal is utilized by Newgrounds members to submit Flash content. Registered users can submit new Flash games or animations and can vote between 0 and 5 on existing submissions. They can leave textual reviews as well, to which the author can reply. If the submission has been uploaded recently, the user can choose to "Blam" the submission (a vote from 0 - 1) or "Protect" the submission (a vote from 2 - 5). Submissions will be deleted if they fall below the following scores after each amount of votes:[3]
Voting on submissions regularly and depositing experience (10 points earned for voting on 5 submissions in a day) increases the voting power a user carries. For example, a level 35 user's vote is worth 7.65 votes. This power is further increased by successfully voting on submissions during the judgment period. Protecting a submission that passes judgment earns protection points, whilst blamming a submission that gets blammed earns blam points.
Uploaded files must conform to certain requirements:
Finally, when the submission is uploaded it receives its own page on Newgrounds and undergoes 'judgment'.
To aid the production of Flash to be submitted, Newgrounds has a variety of preloaders[4] (loading screens that appear at the beginning of a flash game or video) that can be downloaded and integrated into their Flashes.
On May 27, 2009,[5] the Flash Portal underwent a large redesign, switching to a wide layout. Users that disliked the new layout have been given the option to change it via their account preferences.
Authors self-rate submissions for each of these categories: Nudity, Violence, Audio, Text and Adult themes (None, Mild, Excessive and sometimes Explicit depending if it is text or not). The ratings are:
The ratings are only intended as a guide; there is no system in place to prevent people from viewing submissions of any specific rating. The system enables the submitter to record a credit for all the audio used in the submission and links directly to any audio taken from the Newgrounds Audio Portal. However, the ratings may be slightly similar to the ESRB ratings.
When a Flash movie or game is submitted to the Flash Portal, it has the chance to win any of the following awards.
| Complete list of Newgrounds Tank Awards winners | |
|---|---|
| 2007[6] | Movie of the Year: Waterlollies |
| Game of the Year: NG Rumble[7] | |
| User of the Year: Luis Castañón[8] | |
| Musician of the Year: Selcuk Bor[9] | |
| 2008[10] | Movie of the Year: Chuck's New Tux![11] |
| Game of the Year: Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2[12] | |
| User of the Year: Renae Pille[13] | |
| Musician of the Year: Christian M. Krogsvold | |
| 2009[14] | Movie of the Year: Tarboy |
| Game of the Year: Level Up! | |
| User of the Year: Joshua Tomar | |
| Musician of the Year: Hania Lee | |
| 2010 | Movie of the Year: The Pigpen |
| Game of the Year: Depict 1 | |
| User of the Year: Bahamut | |
| Musician of the Year: Matt Cavender | |
The Audio Portal is a place where artists can submit all types of music. When an artist submits their first song an administrator or audio moderator will have to review it before it gets listed. All the music is free to use (under a BY-NC-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license).[15]
Uploaded files must conform to certain requirements:
Since the 2007 redesign, the Audio Portal has become more flexible and allows artists to edit their submissions or remove them providing they haven't been used in a submission to the Flash Portal or haven't been listened to more than 3000 times.[16] Icons can also be added to audio submissions. Unlike the Flash Portal, audio submissions do not face Judgment from Users but instead appear directly on the Audio Portal Main Page.[17]
The main purpose of the Audio Portal was to prevent users from breaking copyright laws; users were using copyrighted songs in their submissions, thus breaking the law and running the risk of being sued.[18] Therefore, the Audio Portal was introduced so that users could submit their own original work. Animators looking for music could pick a song from a list of many different genres ranging from drum and bass to jazz, therefore all users had a good chance to get the kind of music they were looking for without breaking copyright laws.
However, over the years the Audio Portal grew from simply being a resource for the flash portal to draw music and loops from to a full blown portal with a life on its own - with notable users using it as a nursing grounds to increase their talents and then set off in the world under major record labels. Kingbastard[19] and [API] are two examples of this.
Over time however an issue of "Zero-Voting" began to occur. Users would "zero vote" other members in order for their own songs to rise to the top. This issue was magnified with the arrival of the 2007 redesign, which allowed users to vote every day in the art portal on submissions, whilst before the redesign they could only vote once on a submission ever. This also had the unexpected backlash of users fiving up their own submissions, which resulted in a neverending loop of users needing to five their own songs to counteract the massive amount of zeros that were being dished out to their submissions by others. This led to an extreme depression across the audio portal, with many high-ranking musicians leaving the portal in disgust, claiming only to return when the "system was fixed".
Currently many users await the much anticipated 2011 site redesign to see if these problems do indeed get resolved.
The Audio portal was shut down three separate times early in its lifetime, and is now a permanent feature. Wade Fulp has stated that this experience had a negative impact on many audio contributing users. This incident is cited as one of the reasons Ross was hired. Audiences can rate songs from the audio portal and send them to other users, too.
When submitting a piece of music, the user can choose out of a list of predefined genres in order to better classify his song and make it easier for other people to sort through a list and find what they are looking for. The most popular genres are those which are basically electronic music, such as Techno, Trance and Dance. When browsing through the Audio Portal, a person can choose to sort the list of Audio by genre in order to facilitate the search.
| Complete list of Genres | |
|---|---|
| Ambient | Bluegrass |
| Blues | Brit Pop |
| Classical | Classical Rock |
| Country | Dance |
| Drum N Bass | Dubstep |
| Funk | General Rock |
| Goth | Grunge |
| Heavy Metal | Hip Hop - Modern |
| Hip Hop - Olskool | House |
| Indie | Industrial |
| Jazz | Latin |
| Miscellaneous | New Wave |
| Pop | Punk |
| R&B | Ska |
| Techno | Trance |
| Video Game | Voice Acting |
In the Newgrounds Audio Portal there are also occasional contests in which money and shirts can be won. Some user-created music from the Audio Portal was used in The Behemoth's console video games Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers.
More recently, The Monthly Audio Contest (MAC) was attempted to be reinstated - however, the originator of this contest (Rucklo)[20] objected and thus the name of the new monthly contest has been changed to NAC (newgrounds audio contest) - with secondary NACs being referred to as SNACs. In addition the NACs are now a newgrounds supported monthly official contest on newgrounds. The monthly contests have historically been run by notable members of the audio portal community and are considered to play an important role in fostering and strengthening the collective spirit of the audio portal community. The NACs are Run collectively through Chronamut[21] and Brokendeck.[22]
Another competition worth mentioning on the Newgrounds Audio Portal, is the Newgrounds Audio Death Match (or NGADM). In the form of a knockout based competition, an unlimited number of people can join for the auditions, which last for approximately a month, after which 32 finalists are chosen from these auditioneers. These finalists then have to pass through a series of 5 rounds, where they get paired up with random opponents, and compete with a completely new song per round to see who can do better in the eye of the six judges. With this system, the 32 finalists get narrowed down to 2 for the Final Round. Winners, Runner-ups and 3rd Placers get a prize forum signature custom made for the competition as well as a FrontPage (See Achievements) and a review from each of the judges. Although the NGADM is not an official Newgrounds competition and is as such not yet supported by Tom Fulp in terms of money, it has already occurred twice, the NGADM 2009[23] and the NGADM 2010,[24] and the third NGADM (2011) is currently in planning. The competition is currently administrated by Echo and Supersteph54.
When submitting to the portal, there are 3 achievements a user can strive for. One is the weekly top 5 - which is determined by highest score combined with amount of votes, taken between the hours of 12:00 and 12:05 AM Wednesday morning. Only songs submitted that week may qualify for this. The second achievement is the weekly top 30, which is determined the same way as the weekly top 5, but applies to all songs submitted ever. The third Achievement is to be featured on the frontpage of newgrounds. This is decided by the mods who shows up here, not by the user.
Unfortunately this system has led to what people coin the "tuesday night zero voting spree" in which a flurry of zero voting occurs across the board in order to raise chances of one's own song entering the top 5 or the top 30. However it does have the benefit of keeping scores on newgrounds in the audio portal around the 4.40 range, much like fires in a forest help maintain growth and renewal.
Being on either of these three achievements, or all 3, results in exponential amounts of views, votes downloads, and reviews of a song. Much more than one would have if they were simply on the audio portal genre charts. However being on these charts tends to expose your songs to more "realistic" voters, and most song's scores end up suffering as a result, with their song only being on the top 30 or top 5 once or twice in its lifetime.
Unfortunately with the introduction of the top 30 rankings on the individual genre charts means significantly less to users these days, with songs having a score of 5 generally being wiped off the top of the list by older users who see these users as simply attempting to raise their scores to the top. The charts fluctuate an extreme amount and placement on the charts no longer indicates any measure of quality in a song, as it did post 2007 redesign.
The Art Portal was launched on June 18, 2009.[25] Art submitted is generally subject to a creative commons license, similar to the Audio Portal, but users have the option of opting out of it. The Art Portal is intended to be a showcase of the best art created by the Newgrounds community; users are encouraged to submit art to the Portal, which will be automatically featured in a private gallery on their userpages. Users can vote on the art, creating an average score for the artwork, but this does not accrue experience, unlike voting on animation submissions. Newgrounds allows art of any genre or medium to be submitted, although the community predominantly focuses on digital art. Photography is not allowed, except to document other works.
Skilled artists among the community are given the 'scouting' privilege, which allows them to authorize individual users to submit their art directly to the Art Portal, and also the ability to 'scout' other artwork. The intention of this system is to keep the art featured in the Art Portal to a relatively high level of quality, adopting a method dissimilar to the judgment system used by the Flash Portal. Users who have been scouted and have submitted artwork of poor quality can lose their submission privileges. A team of moderators oversees the scouting tree, pruning users who manage to take advantage of the system. If a user were to be removed from the tree, anyone who was recursively scouted in his branch would also be removed. This system was unique to image portals at the time of its inception and is the first known instance of such a system.
Attack
On September 6, 2009, the art portal was vandalized. A spam group known as the Duck Division phished the Newgrounds account of an animator known as Egoraptor, by linking to a website using vv instead of w in the URL. They used Egoraptor's account to un-scout every user who was able to submit art to the portal. They then proceeded to fill the portal with offensive art works. The damage has since been repaired and most of the users affected have been re-scouted. There were no news posts on the home page announcing the vandalism.
The admins of Newgrounds maintain a group of collections of submissions. General groups such as Games or Toons are subdivided into types or years. The collections help viewers of Newgrounds navigate the website easier and find what they are looking for. For example, the Clock Crew collection contains Flash videos pertaining to the Clock Crew, a specific group on Newgrounds. Series collections are also allotted to popular serial Flash, such as Neurotically Yours, Salad Fingers, and Eddsworld. The admins create the collections and decide which submissions go into the collection, but viewers can vote on which collections they think a given submission should be put into, which may influence this decision.
Newgrounds has made recent moves to move to a user run Genre system for organizing flash, though this system is still in a data-collection phase.
The Newgrounds Forum has a community with many unique postings a day. Its community discusses a topics in 16 forum categories ranging from site related Flash submissions to personal and off-topic discussion. The most popular section on the forum is "General" discussion which, as of July 5, 2011, houses more than 669,000 topics. The entire BBS currently contains more than 1,040,000 topics.[26] In the Flash or Art forum there is a far more serious and moderated discussion as the staff strongly encourage a creative community. The most registered users to ever be on the BBS at the same time was 774 (July 17, 2007, at 5:23 PM).[26]
Newgrounds also has a fluctuating number of forum mods.
The forums are often used to run competitions and community projects. Competitions are generally held for Audio, Art, Music, and Writing on monthly basis by an assortment of administrators, moderators, and regular users. Prizes are funded by Newgrounds and have generally been cash, store credit or hardware. In a more unofficial capacity, the NG News forums have been annually used to give away Wacom Tablets to artists who could not afford them otherwise, but have contributed promising art over the last year. These prizes have enabled or motivated many artists to contribute to the world of Flash movies, collaborate, and release hard editions of their product in online stores.
Initially, Newgrounds sold stickers and other merchandise through a watered down version of today's store and cafepress. In 2007, Newgrounds started a basic store that was hosted completely on site, selling shirts and stickers of different Newgrounds series such as Pico and Tankmen. On August 19, 2008, Newgrounds launched its official store,[27] selling more products than ever, including those made by other Newgrounds artists. Items for sale include:
The store currently only accepts credit cards. Store credit can also be earned from winning various contests.
It has become more common in recent history for the community to collaborate and sell anthology style works in the store. Prime examples of this are the Newgrounds calendar and artist discs.
Since the Newgrounds API was released and users were allowed to split their earnings between authors, users have been donating a portion of their earnings to charities by creating and sharing accounts which resemble the names of the charities for donating. This began in 2009, when a user, ForNoReason, took it upon himself to organize flash artists.[28]
Newgrounds hosts and participates in many events throughout the year to give users a chance to meet each other or to interact in general. Some events are organized by regulars but usually by forum moderators and site administrators.
Notable events: