Bomis

» see bomis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i thought about bomis as a discrete thing was while reading the wikipedia origin story, years after the brand had already gone quiet. bomis was the holding company that sat behind nupedia and the first eighteen months of wikipedia. it never showed up in my web life as a destination. the search engine was US-coded and adult-oriented, the webrings were in english, and by the time i would have noticed it, the only thing left worth noting was that the encyclopedia project had outgrown its parent.

jimmy wales founded bomis in chicago in 1996 with two friends, tim shell and michael davis and ran it out of san diego from 1998. the company name came from a private joke ("bitter old men in suits"). the business model rotated through several portal experiments before settling into a paid adult-content tier with a search engine that crawled for nude images. an advertising staffer once told a reporter that about 99% of searches on the site were for that. the cash was real.

that cash funded nupedia in march 2000, then wikipedia on 15 january 2001 after nupedia's peer-review pipeline stalled. wales has put the bomis subsidy figure at somewhere around $100,000. by 2003 wikipedia was big enough to split off into the wikimedia foundation. bomis itself drifted on for a few years without much updating. by 2006 it was effectively inactive. by 2007 the brand was finished.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

the cleaner version of bomis history would call it a search portal. the harder one would call it a babe directory with webrings around it. the babe engine indexed nudes while the rings linked sites by topic. the whole thing sat in the 1998 to 2002 window when male-coded portals were a viable web business. yahoo and excite were doing the family version of the same play at a larger scale. bomis ran the version with the explicit content paid tier. it was profitable enough to subsidize a side project.

~ the wikipedia inheritance ~

the side project outgrew its parent. nupedia was the first attempt at a peer-reviewed free encyclopedia, with academics writing under bomis money and larry sanger editing. wikipedia started as a softer companion to it, then within a year it became the main thing. sanger left in march 2002 when bomis pulled his salary. by 2003 the project moved under the new wikimedia foundation. bomis kept the trademark for a while and then let it go.

~ the long tail ~

the wikipedia article on bomis is one of the longer obituaries the encyclopedia has written about its own funder. it sits at a strange angle, given the conflict of interest involved. the bomis.com domain still pointed somewhere through the 2010s but the brand never reactivated. for a small san diego dot-com that ran banner-adult content on the side, the legacy outcome is hard to match. the encyclopedia outlived it by a factor of decades, and most of the readers do not know the name of the company that paid for the first year of servers.

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