Skip to content
Bomis
CompanyQ935818· pop 38· linked from 189 articles

Bomis, Inc. (, from Bitter Old Men in Suits; rhyming with "promise") was an American dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Key facts

Website.name
Bomis, Inc.
Website.logo
Bomis oval.svg
Website.company_type
Private
Website.foundation
1996
Website.CEO
Tim Shell
Website.location_city
St. Petersburg, Florida
Website.location_country
United States
Website.industry
Dot-com
Website.num_employees
10
Website.url
bomis.com, archived at the Internet Archive
Website.language
English
Website.advertising
Yes
Website.registration
No
Website.launch_date
1996
Website.dissolved
2007

via Wikipedia infobox

~20 min read

Encyclopedic overview

13 sections
Contents
  • History
  • Background
  • Foundation
  • Hosted content
  • Nupedia and Wikipedia
  • Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
  • Aftermath
  • Description of site
  • Footnotes
  • References
  • Bibliography
  • Further reading
  • External links

Bomis, Inc. (, from Bitter Old Men in Suits; rhyming with "promise") was an American dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The company initially tried a number of ideas for content, including being a directory of information about Chicago. The site subsequently focused on content geared to a male audience, including information on sporting activities, automobiles, and women. Bomis became successful after focusing on pornography. "Bomis Babes" was devoted to erotic images; the "Bomis Babe Report" featured adult pictures. Bomis Premium, available for an additional fee, provided explicit material. "The Babe Engine" helped users find erotic content through a web search engine. The advertising director for Bomis noted that 99 percent of queries on the site were for nude women.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Bomis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.