AboutUs.org

AboutUs
Type Private
Founded 2006
Headquarters Denver, Colorado, United States
Founder(s) Ray King, Jay Westerdal
Revenue unknown
Owner Omkarasana LLC
Slogan(s) Tell the world about it!
Website http://www.aboutus.org
Alexa rank negative increase 3,707 (April 2014)[1]
Type of site Wiki Web directory
Advertising Google AdSense
Registration Optional
Available in multilingual
Launched May 9, 2006
Current status active

AboutUs.org started out as a wiki Internet domain directory. It listed websites along with information about their content. As a wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information. AboutUs.org has since become a wiki for more than just websites. The site now allows pages to be created for people, places, and almost anything else.

Ray King, Jay Westerdal, & Paul Stahura founded AboutUs in 2005. Later in 2006 a small staff of five people in Portland, Oregon, United States developed out the site. The staff expanded to more than thirty people and two continents with an office in Lahore, Pakistan. From May 2007 to early 2011, Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, was the chief technology officer of AboutUs.

AboutUs.org attracted at least 1.4 million U.S. visitors in July 2008.[2] Traffic and revenue started declining sharply and in 2013 AboutUs.org and its assets were sold to Omkarasana LLC, a Colorado Limited Liability Company located in Denver. The new company has since redesigned the website, migrated its infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services, and increased visitors and revenue. There are now approximately four individuals that actively operate the site.

Website contents

There were more than ten million entries on AboutUs.org as of March 2008, and new pages are added at a rate of about 25,000 a day.[3] Most entries were created by a web robot (bot); web searches by users direct the bot to create a page for a web domain. In many cases the content is simply a republication of the contents of the "About us", "About me", or similar page on the website. Such pages typically describe the entity that owns the site, and may include self-promotional information, which AboutUs.org does not restrict. In many other cases the content of an entry consists of the whois data for the website. As of February 2014, there were more than 20 million entries.

Data use

Some websites that analyze domains and traffic link to AboutUs.org as a point of additional reference. Notably, the "Whois" site DomainTools now references the Aboutus.org listing along with standard server information, domain ownership and history, and additional data. AboutUs has also referenced whois data content from the registrars Network Solutions and Register.com.[4]

Malware domains

To prevent users from visiting malware domains, editors work with McAfee SiteAdvisor[5] and PHSDL[6] to identify such domains. Once a malware domain is identified, an AboutUs MalwareSite template is placed to warn users.[7]

Popularity

AboutUs.org is an open directory, and does not restrict website owners from writing in their own comments, or referencing commercial information that is not necessarily notable; webmasters are permitted to engage in self-promotion in terms of highlighting their website's features.

AboutUs.org fills the gap for webmasters by encouraging the posting of information about all websites regardless of notability or commercial interest.

Because of the open editing policy, and inclusion of commercial sites, it has grown rapidly in its content. It is also popular among webmasters or website owners seeking to include their "about us" information on AboutUs.org, as a central point of summary information on the web.

Funding

In November 2006, AboutUs closed its initial financing round for one million dollars.[8]

In January 2009, AboutUs secured a $5 million funding round from Voyager Capital.[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Aboutus.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. ↑ AboutUs.org People Count according to Compete.com
  3. ↑ Redden, Jim (2008-03-04). "Startup mines for riches in collaboration software". The Portland Tribune. Archived from the original on 14 March 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  4. ↑ Network Solutions and Register.com join AboutUs.org project
  5. ↑ McAfee Siteadvisor.com
  6. ↑ PHSDL - Project Honeypot Spam Domains List
  7. ↑ AboutUs Template:MalwareSite
  8. ↑ Aliza Earnshaw, "Startup hits the money with biz wiki", Portland Business Journal, November 10, 2006
  9. ↑ Aliza Earnshaw, "AboutUs nabs $5M infusion", Portland Business Journal, January 9, 2009

External links