Barbara Mikkelson
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Type of site
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Reference pages |
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| Owner |
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| Created by | Barbara and David P. Mikkelson |
| Editor | Brooke Binkowski, managing editor |
| Slogan(s) | Rumor Has It |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 2,353 (US 606) (September 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required only on forums |
| Launched | 1995 |
| Current status | Active |
Snopes.com /ˈsnoʊps/, formally known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is one of the first online fact-checking websites. It is a widely known resource for validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture, receiving 300,000 visits a day in 2010.
In 1996, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, that mainly presented search results of user discussions. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes antedated the search engine concept where people could go to check facts by searches. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) as a username in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.
In 2002, the site had become well-known enough that a television pilot called Snopes: Urban Legends, was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks. By mid-2014, Barbara Mikkelson had not written for the site "in several years" and David Mikkelson hired employees to assist him from Snopes.com's message board. The Mikkelsons divorced around the same time, and Barbara no longer has an ownership stake in Snopes.com.
On March 9, 2017 Mikkelson terminated a brokering agreement with Proper Media, the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. This prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav--the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com--started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. Later, in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending. Snopes.com raised almost $700,000 from the GoFundMe effort in 2017.
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