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Which came first, Netflix or Wikipedia?

Which came first, Netflix or Wikipedia?
Netflix
1997 — 4 years before Wikipedia

Netflix came first, by 4 years. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.

Side by side

Netflix Wikipedia
Year 1997 2001
Date 1997-08-29 2001-01-15
Category technology technology
What happened Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Netflix

Netflix was founded in August 1997, a year before Google, and posted DVDs for a decade before streaming launched in January 2007. The famous origin story — Hastings founding it after a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 — has been called a useful myth by co-founder Marc Randolph. Blockbuster declined to buy the company for $50 million in 2000.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia launched in January 2001 as a scratchpad for Nupedia, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia project started in 2000 that had produced about two dozen articles in a year. The wiki produced more than that in its first month and Nupedia was abandoned in 2003. Wikipedia is older than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the iPhone.

Common questions

Which came first, Netflix or Wikipedia?
Netflix, by 4 years — 1997 against 2001.
When did Netflix start?
1997. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.
When did Wikipedia start?
2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked