| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | St. Petersburg, Florida, United States |
| Key people | Jimmy Wales Tim Shell Michael Davis |
| Revenue | N/A |
| Employees | 10 |
| Website | bomis.com archived at the Internet Archive |
| Alexa rank | ~60,000 |
| Type of site | Internet portal Advertising space |
| Registration | no |
| Available in | English |
| Launched | 1996[1] |
| Current status | Down, no IP address. |
Bomis ( /ˈbɒmɨs/ to rhyme with "promise")[2] was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia.[1] As of 2006, Tim Shell was the CEO of Bomis, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet the same year. The name was an acronym of Bitter Old Men in Suits.[3]
Bomis created and hosted web rings around search terms popular among male users. The rings were categorized broadly as "Babe", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Science fiction", and "Other".[4] The "Adult", "Babe", and "Entertainment" categories were the most frequently updated and the most popular. In addition, Bomis hosted a copy of the Open Directory Project search directory. These search-related pages generated revenue from advertising and affiliate marketing.
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Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated[5] 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,[6] and also hosted The Babe Engine, "a precision babe search engine", which indexes photos ranging from glamour photography to pornography.[7]
In addition, Bomis has provided hosting to websites supporting Objectivist and other libertarian political views, including the "Freedom's Nest",[8] 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. 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 free 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. All intellectual property and domain name assets, including "Wikipedia", were transferred or donated over to the foundation, which was registered as a non-profit organization, but the server hardware was not transferred.[9] Bomis CEO Tim Shell became the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the foundation, with Jimmy Wales as another board member. In December 2006 Tim Shell was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede. Jimmy Wales continues to retain a role on the board of the Foundation, which now is entirely responsible for funding (almost entirely through donations) the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
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