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| Type of business | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Type of site | |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | 2006; 18 years ago (2006) |
| Headquarters | Denver, Colorado, U.S. |
| Owner | Omkarasana, LLC |
| Founder(s) | |
| URL | aboutus |
| Advertising | Google AdSense |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | May 9, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-05-09) |
| Current status | Online, without activity |
AboutUs.com is an inactive internet domain directory wiki. It lists websites along with information about their content. As a wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information. AboutUs.com has since become a wiki for more than just websites. The site allows pages to be created for people, places, and almost anything else.
Ray King, Jay Westerdal, and 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 attracted at least 1.4 million U.S. visitors in July 2008. They used to use the domain name "AboutUs.org", but moved to new site under "AboutUs.com" in May 2010. Traffic and revenue started declining sharply and in 2013 AboutUs.com 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 attempted to increase visitors and revenue. However, as of February 2024, activity on the site has all but ceased, with only one edit being performed since November 2018.
Website contents
There were more than ten million entries on AboutUs.com as of March 2008, with about 25,000 pages being added a day during that period. 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.com 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.com as a point of additional reference. Notably, the "Whois" site DomainTools referenced the Aboutus.com listing along with standard server information, domain ownership and history, and additional data. AboutUs also referenced whois data content from the registrars Network Solutions and Register.com.
Malware domains
To prevent users from visiting malware domains, editors worked with McAfee SiteAdvisor and PHSDL to identify such domains. Once a malware domain is identified, an AboutUs MalwareSite template was placed to warn users.
Popularity
AboutUs.com 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.
AboutUs.com 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, its volume of content grew rapidly. It was also popular among webmasters or website owners seeking to include their "about us" information on AboutUs.com, as a central point of summary information on the web.
Decline
Editing activity on the site appears to have ceased entirely in 2018. Even in 2018, editing was done only by a handful of prolific editors The only edit since 2018 has been to the terms of service page, when the address to send copyright infringement notices to was updated in May 2020; as of February 2024, no other edits have taken place.
Funding
In November 2006, AboutUs closed its initial financing round for one million dollars. In January 2009, AboutUs secured a $5 million funding round from Voyager Capital.
See also
References
- "AboutUs.com People Count according to Compete.com". Archived from the original on 2020-03-02. Retrieved 2015-11-05.
- "We've launched a new site: AboutUs.com". 2010-05-11. Archived from the original on 2010-05-18. Retrieved 2021-03-20.
- ^ "Recent Changes". AboutUs. Archived from the original on 27 February 2024. Retrieved 27 February 2024.
- Redden, Jim (2008-03-04). "Startup mines for riches in collaboration software". The Portland Tribune. Archived from the original on 2008-03-14.
- Network Solutions and Register.com join AboutUs.com project Archived March 7, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- McAfee Siteadvisor.com
- "PHSDL - Project Honeypot Spam Domains List". Archived from the original on 2008-01-20. Retrieved 2008-01-26.
- AboutUs Template:MalwareSite
- Aliza Earnshaw, "Startup hits the money with biz wiki", Portland Business Journal, November 10, 2006
- Aliza Earnshaw, "AboutUs nabs $5M infusion", Portland Business Journal, January 9, 2009
External links
- AboutUs.com
- Marshall Kilpatrick, "AboutUs: A Wiki About Every Website," TechCrunch, 11/14/2006.