Newgrounds.com

Newgrounds.com is a multimedia content and entertainment platform that was founded by Tom Fulp on July 12th, 1995. It currently runs off of user uploaded content that is generally reviewed by other usershttps://medium.com/@SeanBuckelew/newgrounds-64831b97a5a8.
== History ==
Newgrounds was founded by Tom Fulp in Philadelphia on July 12th, 1995, along with the help of James Holloway, Josh Tuttle, and Jeff Bandelin. In 1999, the game Pico's School was released, much to the community's enjoyment. Pico would eventually come to be one of the website's mascots. 
By 2000, there were so many Portal submissions that submitting Flash content to the Portal would become an automated process with the help of Fulp's friend Ross. Tom has stated that the automated Portal "ultimately defined [Newgrounds]'s purpose".
While Macromedia Flash Player was required for Newgrounds in order to play games, the site also brought together members who were interested in producing Flash games and gained "considerable online influence" as a result. It subsequently became one of the most "active Flash creator communities in the English-speaking Internet" and served as a place that video game developers could begin their careers.
By November 2008, Newgrounds had over 1.5 million users and over 130,000 animations.https://web.archive.org/web/20181221095604/http://yardi.people.si.umich.edu/pubs/Yardi_BlackBox08.pdf This had increased by August 2010, when it was reported that the site had over 2.2 million users and over 180,000 games and animated films, most of which were animations made by only one person, with others collaboratively made by various individuals.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds#CITEREFLutherCaineZiglerBruckman2010 It was also said in 2013 that users had created "hundreds of thousands of animated movies and online games"."Let's Get Together: The Formation and Success of Online Creative Collaborations" - Settles, Burr; Dow, Steven (April 2013)
In 2018, Newgrounds began to encourage contributors to submit their games in an HTML5 format rather than Flash."View of Growing old on Newgrounds: The hopes and quandaries of Flash game preservation" - Fiadotau, Mikhail (August 2020)
In the summer of 2019, with the discontinuation of Flash upcoming, the administration of Newgrounds unveiled the Newgrounds Player for Windows, which was described as a "solution for playing Flash games and movies" hosted on the site.
In April 2021, an update for the browser game Friday Night Funkin' was exclusively released on Newgrounds at the time, causing the site's server to become overloaded after an influx of site traffic.
In July 2021, Fulp received the Game Developers Choice Awards Pioneer Award for his contributions to establishing Newgrounds and subsequent work in The Behemoth.
In September 2023, an update to the site's Art Portal was rolled out, implementing it in the existing Project system for animation, games and audio, as well as adding the ability to use multi-author credits on Art submissions and adding multi-art support in either Inline, Strip or Gallery formats."Art Portal: Multi-Art and Multi-Author!" - Newgrounds
In March 2024, the site's reporting system was updated to enable users to report content predominantly generated by artificial intelligence (AI).This week's site update - Newgrounds
== Content ==
Newgrounds allows users to upload their own content (most commonly in Flash) to one of the four main portals: Art, Games, Movies, and Audio. Pieces in the Games and Movies section are subject to a rating system that is based around a 5-star system. Other users can review said content, and that judgement chooses whether or not the content will continue being shown on the website, or get deleted (blammed). Blammed content only has it's reviews saved in a special "obituary" section.
Content in the Art or Audio section would instead be "scouted". Scouting is a different form of content approval, in which a moderator or a "scouter" gives manual approval of the piece, or it gets deleted. Once somebody has been scored, they gain the ability to scout other users.
== Trivia ==
*Despite Pico's School being the third game in the franchise, it was the first game that Pico ever appeared in.
== References ==
Category:Websites with the .com domain
Category:Websites registered in 1995
Category:Content platform websites
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