---
title: "Which came first, Netflix or Wikipedia?"
description: "Netflix vs Wikipedia: Netflix came first, by 4 years — 1997 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/netflix-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# 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.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]