Newgrounds

1990s

In 1991, at the age 13, Tom Fulp launched a Neo Geo fanzine under the name "New Ground" sending issues to approximately 100 members of a club originating on the internet in Prodigy.^[5] Fulp launched a website as New Ground Remix using a hosting service, increasing popularity in the summer of 1996 after BBS games Club a Seal^[6] and Assassin were created by Fulp while a student at Drexel University, Pennsylvania. Fulp created the sequels to his creations, as games Club a Seal II and Assassin II," along with the decision to develop a separate hosting site, titled as New Ground Atomix.^[7]

Fulp began experimenting with Macromedia Flash, along with programming a Flash-compatible homepage that was later introduced to his secondary site, "Telebubby Fun Land", and was later released. Fulp later merged his two websites to form another website with the name Newgrounds, leading to him to change hosts to accommodate the increasing traffic, and started selling merchandise to pay for the website's hosting bills. Introducing banner ads to pay for growing payments in 1999, Fulp partnered with Troma, who hosted the site in exchange for a share of ad revenue. A chat room and message board was added onto the website, which allowed people visiting the website to interact with each other. Many users had begun submitting their own Flash creations to Fulp, in which he decided in a portion of the site called "The Portal." A friend of Fulp named Ross developed the “Grounds Gold System”, which allowed users to gain points for visiting the site and voting submissions online. Ad revenue had increased, so Ross was hired, starting development of an current automated Portal, which would allow users to submit their own generated content to the website.

2000s

After the dot-com bubble collapsed, Newgrounds struggled in paying its hosting costs. The affiliation with Troma ended in 2003 and Newgrounds switched to another bandwidth provider, which significantly reduced hosting costs. 2004 saw Newgrounds recovering from the online market crash, and the Numa Numa Dance viral phenomenon made its debut on Newgrounds near the end of the year, and became one of the first viral videos on the internet. Medals, the equivalent of in-game achievements, were introduced for the first time through the API software in 2009, soon followed by a "Sharing" component that would allow content to be distributed within games, such as custom level designs. The Art Portal in its complete form was launched in June of the same year, along with the renovation of the company’s headquarters.

2010s

In 2011, the Newgrounds Annual Tournament of Animation (NATA) began as a 4–6 month long animation competition on Newgrounds sponsored by Adobe. In 2012, Newgrounds published their first mobile game, titled GroundCats, on iOS. That same year, major changes to the website included the launch of the video player, allowing users to publish movies that were not in .SWF format for the first time, and support for HTML5-coded games, which meant users were no longer limited to submitting movies and games made in Flash. In 2013, the site suffered heavily through financial issues and closed down its online market following the year after. Platform mobile game Geometry Dash developed by RobTop Games allowed songs from Newgrounds to be used in levels made with the level editor with the release of its 1.9 update in 2014. The Audio Portal consisted of submitted copyrighted songs for use in the game, leading to Nightcore, along with mashups, banned as a result.

An similar issue of copyrighted concurred in 2016, when the site began receiving complaints that old content and files contained unlicensed commercial music and images, resulting in the following submissions being removed by moderators and staff. In 2018, new servers and video-encoding-software were unveiled, along with developments for the site to be ad-free, and improve page performance.