Wikia Inks Deal Valued at More Than $2 Million for Rights to ArmchairGM
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Wikia to Acquire Popular Online Sports Community, Plans to Incorporate User-Generated News and Voting Functionality into Current and Future Wiki-Based Fan Sites
SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Wikia, Inc. ( http://wikia.com/ ) the leading site for information on thousands of topics written by a community of contributors, today announced that it has agreed in principle to acquire popular online sports community ArmchairGM ( http://armchairgm.com ) in a deal valued at more than $2 million.
Both companies share a vision of creating free and open content that enables passionate users to create online communities around any topic of interest. Already, both Wikia and ArmchairGM leverage the same underlying software and encourage users to play an active role in the creation and maintenance of the community by allowing them to easily edit, share, and enhance all content on a given topic.
“Our users have been asking for more interactive and graphically intuitive features,” said Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia. “When we looked at what the ArmchairGM guys had created, we saw tremendous similarities and some real innovation. You can expect to see us move quickly to incorporate some of the more interactive features of the ArmchairGM technology into Wikia—particularly the voting capabilities. At the same time, we continue to look for other acquisition candidates building off Mediawiki software.”
After the acquisition, the ArmchairGM site will continue to operate independently and will maintain its focus on providing fans with a robust community where they can interact with others about all-things sports. ArmchairGM’s four founders, Dan Lewis, Aaron Wright, David Pean, and Rob Lefkowitz, will join Wikia as full time employees and will remain focused on the ArmchairGM community. In the coming weeks, the two companies will combine technologies to create numerous highly-interactive information communities on topics ranging from restaurant reviews to politics, and everything in-between.
“This acquisition only means good things for our existing community,” said Aaron Wright, co-founder of ArmchairGM. “By joining forces with Wikia, we can provide our existing community with even more ways to create and share their love of sports. At the same time, we look forward to taking what we built for sports fans and applying it to a variety of other topics that people are passionate about; politics, celebrity gossip, restaurants – and whatever else people can imagine.”
About Wikia, Inc.
Since the site's launch in November 2004, over 2,000 Wikia have been created and edited by some 30,000 registered users. Wikia are already available in over 45 languages. Currently, Wikia hosts several sports-focused sites such as, The NASCAR Wikia at http://nascar.wikia.com , the NFL Wikia at http://nfl.wikia.com , and the Baseball Wikia at http://baseball.wikia.com .
Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.
Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.
About ArmchairGM
Started in March of 2006 by a group of four New York sports fanatics, ArmchairGM has grown to more than 52,000 pages of user-generated content on all-things sports. The site currently offers a sports encyclopedia and dictionary, sports travel guides, “Ask the Chair” Q&A board, a sports blog index, the ability for users to submit and vote on the day’s most popular sports stories, and much more.
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