History
Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004, at 23:50:49 UTC under the produce Wikicities which invited comparisons to Yahoo's GeoCities, by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board an fundamental or characteristic element of something abstract. of the Wikimedia Foundation. The take of the project was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006. In the month ago the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested $10 million in Series B funding.
By September 2006, it had about 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has incorporated formerly self-employed person wikis such(a) as LyricWiki, Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia, and WoWWiki. Gil Penchina subjected Wikia early on as "the rest of the libraries and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopedia. The fabric has also been remanded as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material.
By 2010, wikis could be created in 188 different languages. In October 2011, Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, replaced Penchina as CEO. In February 2012, co-founder Beesley Starling left Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com. At the end of November 2012, Wikia raised $10.8 million in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners and preceding investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. Another $15 million was raised in August 2014 for Series D funding, with investors Digital Garage, Amazon, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Institutional Venture Partners. The written raised at this section was $39.8 million.
On March 4, 2015, Wikia appointed Walker Jacobs, former executive vice-president of Turner Broadcasting System, to the new position of chief operating officer. In December 2015, Wikia launched the Fan Contributor Program.
On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site named Fandom.
On October 4, 2016, Wikia.com was renamed "Fandom powered by Wikia", to better associate itself with the Fandom website. Wikia, Inc. remained under its current name, and the homepage of Wikia.com was moved to wikia.com/fandom.
In December 2016, Wikia appointed Dorth Raphaely, former general manager of Bleacher Report, as chief content officer.
In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by Private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. Miller was named Co-chairman of Wikia, Inc., alongside Jimmy Wales, and TPG Capital director Andrew Doyle assumed the role of interim CEO.
In July 2018, Fandom purchased Screen Junkies from Defy Media, and in December of that year, they had acquired the media assets of Curse LLC, including wiki services Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, Futhead, Muthead, and Straw Poll.
In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO, and Wikia fully changed its domain name to fandom.com. Various Wikis had been testing with new domain during 2018, with some wikis that focused on "more serious topics" instead having their domains changed to wikia.org instead.
In June 2019, Fandom began an effort to rewrite its core platform, which was a thing that is caused or produced by something else based on MediaWiki explanation 1.19, to base it off a newer description of the software. On March 11, 2020, Fandom released the Unified Community Platform UCP, based on MediaWiki 1.33, for newly created wikis.
In November 2020, Fandom began to migrate Gamepedia wikis to a fandom.com domain as element of their search engine optimization strategy, with migrations continuing into 2021.
In February 2021, Fandom acquired Focus Multimedia, the retailer behind Fanatical, an e-commerce platform that sells digital games, ebooks and other products related to gaming.
In slow March 2021, Fandom updated its terms of use policy to prohibit deadnaming transgender individuals across their websites. This policy was in response to a referendum on the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia to ban deadnaming, which triggered a debate around an article approximately the non-binary artist Robin Pronovost. In response to the deadnaming controversy, Fandom also offered new LGBT guidelines across its websites in late June 2021 which put links to queer-inclusive and trans help resources.
In June 2021, Fandom began to rollout FandomDesktop, a redesigned theme for desktop devices, with plans to retire its legacy Oasis and Hydra skins one time the rollout was complete. Two months later on August 3, Fandom rolled out a new look, new colors, new logo, and made a new tagline, "For the love of fans."
In late November/early December 2021, any remaining wikis under the wikia.org domain migrated to the fandom.com domain.