HowStuffWorks is an American commercial infotainment website founded by professor and author Marshall Brain, to provide its target audience an insight into the way many things work. The site uses various media to explain complex concepts, terminology, and mechanisms—including photographs, diagrams, videos, animations, and articles.
MuggleNet is the Internet's oldest and largest Harry Potter and Wizarding World fansite. Founded in 1999, MuggleNet distinguished itself early on by its unique and comprehensive content. Barely one year after it was launched, the site was seeing hundreds of thousands of daily visitors each month at its peak. It has expanded over the years to include a handful of partner podcasts, a separate book blog, over half a dozen published works, and live events. At one point, it also ran its own forums, social network, and separate fan fiction website. MuggleNet currently features over 200 pages of content plus an archive of over 18,000 articles, including news, editorials, recipes, a caption contest, and more. Originally owned by founder Emerson Spartz, MuggleNet became an independently owned and operated brand in early 2020 and according to its Twitter bio, has been women-led since 2017.
Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC is an American video production company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2003 by Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Jason Saldaña, Gus Sorola, and Joel Heyman, Rooster Teeth is a subsidiary of Otter Media, which is itself a subsidiary of WarnerMedia Sales and Distribution, a division of AT&T's WarnerMedia.
David Blake, also known as StankDawg, is the founder of the hacking group Digital DawgPound (DDP) and a long-time member of the hacking community. He is known for being a regular presenter at multiple hacking conferences, but is best known as the creator of the "Binary Revolution" initiative, including being the founding host and producer of Binary Revolution Radio, a long-running weekly Internet radio show which ran 200 episodes from 2003 to 2007.
CollegeHumor is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles. Aside from producing content for release on YouTube, it was also a former humor website owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC) until January 2020 when IAC withdrew funding and the website shut down. Since then, CollegeHumor has continued to release content on YouTube and on its streaming service, Dropout. The site featured daily original humor videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. It was created by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999. CollegeHumor is operated by CH Media, which also operates Dorkly.com and Dropout.tv in addition to CollegeHumor, and formerly operated Drawfee.com.
1Up.com was an American entertainment website that focused on video games. Launched in 2003, 1Up.com provided its own original features, news stories, game reviews, and video interviews, and also featured comprehensive PC-focused content. Like a print magazine, 1Up.com also hosted special week-long "online cover stories" that presented each day a new in-depth feature story, interview with the developers, game screenshot gallery, game video footage, and/or video of the game studio and creators. On February 21, 2013, Ziff Davis announced it would be "winding down" the site, along with sister sites GameSpy and UGO.com.
Drowned in Sound, sometimes abbreviated to DiS, is a UK-based music webzine financed by artist management company Silentway. Founded by editor Sean Adams, the site features reviews, news, interviews, and discussion forums.
Michael Justin "Burnie" Burns is an American writer, actor, producer, comedian, host, and director previously based in Austin, Texas. He is a co-founder, former chief executive officer, and former chief creative officer of Rooster Teeth. He is noted for his contributions in machinima, a form of film-making that uses video game technology in its production, and also works with animation and live action. Burns is also known for his work in the hosting and podcasting field.
GameTrailers (GT) was an American video gaming website created by Geoffrey R. Grotz and Brandon Jones in 2002. The website specialized in multimedia content, including trailers and gameplay footage of upcoming and recently released video games, as well as an array of original video content focusing on video games, including reviews, countdown shows, and other web series.
Machinima, Inc. was an American multiplatform online entertainment network owned by WarnerMedia. The company was founded in January 2000 by Hugh Hancock and was headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
Funny or Die is a comedy video website and film/television production company owned by Henry R. Muñoz III that was founded by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Mark Kvamme, and Chris Henchy. The website contains exclusive material from a regular staff of in-house writers, producers, and directors, and occasionally from a number of famous contributors including Judd Apatow, James Franco, and Norm Macdonald. The production company makes TV shows including truTV's Billy on the Street, Comedy Central's @midnight, and Zach Galifianakis' web series Between Two Ferns.
1Up Shows and Podcasts was a collection of podcasts hosted by 1Up.com dealing with various aspects of gaming. Most of the shows, like 4 Guys 1Up, were about games and general gaming culture. Others were more specific, such as The Sports Game Guy's Sports Anomaly, which focused on sports games. The network also featured Retronauts, an audio retrospective series that chronicled various retro games and game series. The network had shown significant growth, with several new shows having been introduced in 2007–2008. However, in early 2009 1Up.com was purchased by UGO and its parent company Hearst Corporation from Ziff Davis. This resulted not only in the closure of Electronic Gaming Monthly, but also the loss of over 30 jobs, including several hosts and producers of the site's many podcasts. Because of this, more than half of the network's shows were abruptly discontinued, leaving only a few remaining. While 1Up Yours did not cease to exist, the resignation of the show's co-host Shane Bettenhausen led host Garnett Lee to change the show's name and structure to Listen UP. Several former employees also started their own projects after the firings as well, including Co-Op, the spiritual successor to The 1Up Show, Rebel FM, the follow-up to 1Up FM, and The Geekbox, Ryan Scott's replacement for Lan Party podcast.
iFanboy is a weekly audio podcast which focuses on comic books, comic book publishing, and comic book creators. It stars Josh Flanagan, Ron Richards, and Conor Kilpatrick. The first episode of the audio podcast was released on November 2, 2005, and the first episode of the video podcast on January 17, 2007. They were bought by the Boulder-based Graphic.ly in 2010 to add the ready-built community of iFanboy to their digital comics platform. In early 2013, iFanboy amicably split from Graphic.ly and once again became an independently run website by the iFanboys. Shortly thereafter, Ron Richards - a founder of the site and podcast - stepped down as one of the hosts of the show for a position at Image Comics. On September 1, 2013, Flanagan and Kilpatrick issued a joint statement announcing a scale back of day-to-day operations on the iFanboy website. New content - such as reviews, feature articles, previews and the new comic pull list - would no longer be created. Despite scaling back written content, they plan to continue the weekly podcast and infrequent Book- and Talksplodes, with Paul Montgomery. In 2014, Montgomery left iFanboy for the website Panels. In 2015, Ron Richards who had left Image comics returned to iFanboy. The original iFanboys continue on the podcast.
The MMO Report was a humorous, video game news podcast, which originated on G4. Widely watched by gamers and the gaming industry it is hosted by Casey Schreiner. Styled in parody of the Colbert Report, it covers all the interesting and quirky news stories in the Massively multiplayer online game world.
Luke Michael Smith is an American writer. He is a staff member at the video game development company Bungie, and is a former video games journalist. Smith wrote for a college newspaper and weekly papers in Michigan before being hired as one of the first new freelance writers for Kotaku. At Kotaku, Smith developed his writing style but soon left the site for a staff position as 1Up.com's news editor. Smith made a name for himself at 1Up, particularly through an article he wrote focusing on problems with the game Halo 2.
Destructoid is a website that was founded as a video game-focused blog in March 2006 by Yanier Gonzalez, a Cuban-American cartoonist and author. It is part of the Enthusiast Gaming network.
Classic Game Room was a video game review web series produced, directed, edited and hosted by Mark Bussler of Inecom, LLC. The show reviewed both retro and modern video games along with gaming accessories, pinball machines, and minutiae such as gaming mousepads and food products.
Daniel Edward Amrich is an American writer, author, actor, musician, and social media expert. He graduated from Ithaca College with a major in audio production and minor in writing and became a professional journalist and critic with numerous video game and music magazines and websites. He has worked for leading print and online journals including Flux Magazine, Wired, Time Out New York, and others. He works for Ubisoft as a content designer, and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
Extra Credits is a video lesson series currently run by Matthew Krol and Geoffrey Zatkin, narrated by Matthew Krol, with artists Scott DeWitt, Nick DeWitt, David "D" Hueso, and Ali R. Throme and Jordan Martin and writers Robert Rath, R. Kevin Doyle and other staff members. Social Media is run by Kat Rider. The series of videos discusses topics pertinent to video game development and game studies, addressing the legitimacy of video games as art, and creating intellectual discourse on important issues in gaming culture.
Idle Thumbs is a video game culture website and podcast network founded in 2004.
