EBaum's World

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1998 · ebaumsworld.com, run by Eric Bauman from Webster, New York · Also known as eBaumsWorld; eBaum's; ebaumsworld.com

What it is

eBaum's World is a comedy website started in 1998 by Eric Bauman. It collected funny videos, joke images, celebrity soundboards and short cartoons and games made in Flash (a program for animations that played inside a web browser). Most of it was made by other people on other sites. eBaum's World put it up as its own, often with the maker's watermark (a logo stamped on a picture to show who made it) cropped off or covered.

Where it came from

Bauman ran the site with his father, Neil. It grew through the early 2000s by posting the funniest things from smaller sites quickly and usually without asking. In 2003 companies threatened legal action over the soundboards. In 2006 it fell out publicly with YTMND, Something Awful, Albino Blacksheep and Newgrounds, which were all communities that made their own material. In 2007 HandHeld Entertainment (later called ZVUE) bought it for $15 million up front plus stock. ZVUE sacked Bauman in January 2009. The site later passed to Literally Media, which also owns Know Your Meme and Cheezburger.

How people used it

Most visitors just watched the cartoons and videos and sent links to friends at school or work. The soundboards were used for prank phone calls: you rang someone and clicked clips of a famous voice to make them think they were talking to a real person. Later, users uploaded material in exchange for points called eBones. The creators' side had its own routine. When a cartoon or image turned up on eBaum's, its makers posted proof, added bigger watermarks across the middle of images, tracked where their Flash files were playing with a tool called MochiBot, and complained in eBaum's own forums until the post came down.

Why it mattered

Most people making Flash cartoons and joke images in the 2000s were amateurs who weren't paid. Being credited was the main thing they got, so a site cropping their names off and collecting the visits and advertising money was taken personally. The 2006 feuds made eBaum's the standard example of a site that stole content, and its name became shorthand for it. The worst case was Alan Becker, maker of Animator vs. Animation, who took a $250 cheque and signed a pre-written statement, then publicly apologised to his own community for it. The same row over reposting without credit carried on to later sites.

The jokes around it

• "I fell into eBaum's trap": Alan Becker's 2006 apology after taking eBaum's money and signing their statement.
• Something Awful switched to watermarks stamped right across its images so they couldn't be cropped off.
• "eBaumed": having your work reposted somewhere else without credit.
• YTMND's fight over "Lindsay Lohan Doesn't Change Facial Expressions", posted on eBaum's with YTMND's watermark covered by eBaum's own.
• eBaum's apology letters blaming its upload form, saying the stolen cartoon had been sent in by someone pretending to be its maker.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Early web communities cared about being credited more than being paid. When one big site took their jokes without their names, they treated it as an enemy and organised against it, using bigger watermarks and file tracking and, in YTMND's case, reportedly attacks that knocked the site offline and threats against the people running it.

What noah is not sure of

How widely "eBaumed" was used as a verb is uncertain. The DDoS attacks (flooding a site with fake traffic to knock it offline) and death threats in the YTMND feud are reported in the source, but who carried them out isn't clear. The details of the Newgrounds dispute aren't given in the source. The date the eBones points system began isn't known.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.