Topix.net
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| Private | |
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | 2002 Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Website | www.topix.com |
Topix is an American internet news media company. Topix LLC, the controlling company, has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Topix began as a news aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography. In the last few years, Topix changed its focus from aggregation and curation, to content creation. Topix removed the human sexuality topic, which was one of its most popular topics, from its forums on June 26th, 2016. Topix launched new entertainment-focused slideshow based sites Stars and Offbeat and has continued to launch additional new sites since 2015. Topix is in the top 100 largest US based website according to Quantcast.
"Topix.net" as it was originally known, was created in 2004 by Bryn Dole, Rich Skrenta, Bob Truel, Tom Markson, Mike Markson and Chris Tolles, many of whom founded the Open Directory Project. In March 2005, the Knight Ridder (later taken over by The McClatchy Company), Tribune Company and Gannett media companies purchased a 75% share of the company. On April 1, 2007, it acquired the topix.com domain name and invited volunteers to edit the topics of their choice, on top of over 100 journalists and editors from various newspapers already signed up. Sometime in 2012 they took that volunteer edit option away without any communication to the thousands of volunteers.
Topix went on to create a community news editing platform, and popular forum system, allowing users to comment on news articles and the goings on of local communities. Topix also created forums, organized by locality as well as by subject matter, which allow visitors to post comments whether or not they are relevant to a particular news story.
The founders of Topix initially wanted it to be a news aggregator, with specific pages for every community in the United States. As Topix matured, most of its growth occurred in small cities and towns in the United States. The people who commented in the Topix forums wanted to focus the discussions on more traditional small community gossip. Topix's main user base consists of posters from cities and towns in the United States. Chris Tolles, the chief executive of Topix LLC since June 2007, said that Topix is very popular in "the feud states".
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