Fandom (website)
Logo used since August 3, 2021 | |
| Formerly |
|
|---|---|
| Type of business | Private |
Type of site | |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | October 18, 2004 |
| Headquarters | , U.S. |
| Owner | TPG Inc. (2018–present) |
| Founders |
|
| Key people | |
| Products | |
| Subsidiaries | |
| URL | fandom |
| Advertising | Direct and advertising networks |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 350 million (as of December 11, 2023) |
| Launched |
|
| Current status | Active |
Content license | CC Attribution/ Share-Alike 3.0 Unported |
| Written in | |
Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a media conglomerate backed by TPG, a private equity firm. The website offers a platform for hosting wiki pages with social media features on various topics such as video games, movies, books, and TV series. The company also owns several entertainment outlets such as GameSpot and TV Guide, multimedia databases such as GameFAQs, Metacritic and ComicVine, as well as online retailers such as Fanatical.
The privately held for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling. 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, followed by Russia with 7.76%, according to Similarweb.