Newgrounds

About

Newgrounds (site domain: newgrounds.com) is an entertainment portal site where its community members can share Flash-based animation, games and music. The site's featured content consists of in-house creations by staff as well as user submissions. Founded in 1995, Newgrounds has been cited as the web's oldest Flash animation portal user-generated community.

History

New Ground Remix / Atomix

Pennsylvania teenager Tom Fulp started "New Ground"^[1] as a fanzine about the Japanese console Neo Geo^[2], of which approximately 100 copies were distributed. The first web version of the site was built in 1995, but it was scarcely updated until the summer of 1996, when Fulp created the Flash-based games titled Club a Seal^[3] and Assassin^[4]. The former title drew attention for its depiction of animal cruelty, causing Fulp to create a page featuring the hate mail he received in response to the game.^[5]

During his college studies at Drexel University, Fulp published second editions of these games on a new version of the site titled "New Ground Atomix." On this site, he began producing more interactive games, including Cat Dynamics.^[6] He concurrently ran the two sites, Remix and Atomix, until 1998 when Fulp combined them into a portal community.

Newgrounds.com

In 1998, Fulp began building pages with Macromedia Flash (now known as Adobe Flash), a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages, beginning with Tellybubby Fun Land.^[7] The animation showed caricatures of the Teletubbies drinking and doing drugs, sparking a copyright lawsuit with the BBC^[8] in 1999. Newgrounds eventually won, as the site is protected as parody under the US Fair Use law, and received media coverage and international attention as a result.

As a combined entity, the site began to draw more traffic and the site was dropped by its ad company due to the controversial nature of some of the animations. In September 1999, the film company Troma^[9] approached Fulp about hosting the site as part of their network. Known for infamous movies like the Toxic Avenger, Troma hosted Newgrounds as part of their network until 2002.

The site also began to shift away from showcasing Fulp's personal creations to curating a variety of original content created and submitted users. In 2000, Newgrounds introduced the Portal, a method to feature the best of these submissions. The initial Flash Portal was divided into an Audio portal for music and an Art portal for images.

Post-Tumblr Revival

After Tumblr announced their controversial ban on Adult Content to go into effect on December 17th, 2018, Newgrounds tweeted that they still allowed adult content.

The attempt to court migrant Tumblr users led Tumblr users to suggest that Newgrounds was a solid alternative to sites like Twitter and Pillowfort for NSFW content.^[14] about how they would be "migrating" to Newgrounds. Many also made jokes centered around the fact that Newgrounds' days as one of the more popular websites on the internet were well behind it. For example, user generaldelphox posted a John Wick parody about rediscovering Newgrounds created by KnowYourMeme user Army and Stuff (shown below, left). User uss-edsall posted a Jeb Wins parody (shown below, right).

This led to a surge of traffic on Newgrounds. On December 3rd, Tom Fulp welcomed the "second wave" of new artists who had been migrating to the site, instructing them on how to host their art on the site.^[16] He wrote that "Newgrounds is currently experiencing a second great artist migration as Tumblr announced today that they will be removing ALL adult content on December 17th. UPDATE: We added a massive amount of new capacity after traffic got super heavy. Sorry for the site running slow for a bit."

Features

• The home page is curated by staff administrators and displays a variety of recent user submissions picked by the staff.

• The Flash portal is utilized by Newgrounds members to submit Flash content. Registered users can submit new Flash games or animations and can vote between 0 and 5 on existing submissions.

• The Audio Portal is a media sharing platform where artists can submit and share all types of music, all of which is free to use for remixes under Creative Commons license.

• The Art Portal is a place similar to the Audio Portal with an option for users to opt out of Creative Commons license. Launched on June 18th, 2009, the Art Portal allows art submissions of any genre or medium, but it primarily focuses on digital art.

Influence

Some of the earliest users of newgrounds like typequeen and Doki66 went on to have huge fame on youtube. The website was featured on the news a number of times. Has a huge influence on the underground electronic music and modern rock music communities. And most of the times has information before Reddit .

Strawberry Clock (aka "King of the Portal")

The strawberry clock bonanza started after the user strawberry clock started a widely popular series of videos on the flash portal. He is one of the older users dating back from March of 2000, he is the king of the portal as proclaimed by Tom Fulp himself. The videos he makes are usually random but constantly funny. The games can either be simple like b the game or complex like clock day smack down '11.

Traffic

As of September 27th, 2011, Newgrounds has an Alexa^[10] traffic rank of 1427, a Compete^[11] rank of 396, and a Quantcast^[12] rank of 1326.

Search Interest

Search for Newgrounds peaked in June 2005, with search consistently rising during the summer months and December, corresponding with school breaks. Search overall has been steadily declining, similar to the decline in searching for flash animation as well as YTMND and Ebaum's World, two sites that were also popular memetic hubs in the 2000s.

Highlights

Since its launch in 1995, Newgrounds has long served as a hubsite for classic memes like Numa Numa, Charlie the Unicorn, Salad Fingers, Phoenix Wrong. It Prints Money and Shut Down Everything stemmed from Newgrounds uploads as well.

Newgrounds also provided an early boost for memes like Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Star Wars Kid, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, I could eat a knob at night, Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, What Is Love?, and The Llama Song.

A few memes have also stemmed from the Newgrounds forums, including The Legend of DickNeck and Fairy Bounce gifs.

Major Redesign

On Monday February 6th, Newgrounds had declared they were going to change the entire site into a new design. The site had been temporarily down for 2 days before the site was finished with the redesign.

The news attracted many users, with many comments on the Newgrounds Facebook page,^[13] many of which were either about shock, surprise, or nostalgia.

(Picture of downtime unavailable)

The New design is finished:

External References