WAbsolutePunk was a website, online community, and alternative music news source founded by Jason Tate. The website mainly focused on artists who are relatively unknown to mainstream audiences, but it was known to feature artists who have eventually achieved crossover success, including Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, New Found Glory, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, The Gaslight Anthem, Anberlin, Thrice, All Time Low, Jack's Mannequin, Yellowcard, Paramore, Relient K, and A Day to Remember. The primary musical genres of focus were emo and pop punk, but other genres were included.
WBitstrips was a media and technology company based in Toronto, Canada, and founded in 2007 by Jacob Blackstock, David Kennedy, Shahan Panth, Dorian Baldwin, and Jesse Brown. The company's web application, Bitstrips.com, allowed users to create comic strips using personalized avatars, and preset templates and poses. Brown and Blackstock explained that the service was meant to enable self-expression without the need to have artistic skills. Bitstrips was first presented in 2008 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and the service later piloted and launched a version designed for use as educational software. The service achieved increasing prominence following the launch of versions for Facebook and mobile platforms.
WChaCha was an American human-guided search engine that provided free, real-time answers to any question, through its website, or by using one of the company's mobile apps.
WCute Overload was a weblog featuring commentary, photos and videos related to various aspects of cuteness in animals. The site was created by Megan Frost.
WElfwood was a popular web-based alternative art gallery and online community devoted to original science fiction and fantasy art and writing. It was started 1 May 1996 by Thomas Abrahamsson and claimed to be the largest science fiction and fantasy art site in the world. Gradually overwhelmed by its competitor DeviantArt, Elfwood was eventually shut down some time in 2016.
WExaminer.com was an American news website based in Denver, Colorado, that operated using a network of "pro-am contributors"' for content. It had various local editions with contributors posting city-based items tailored to 238 markets throughout the United States and parts of Canada in two putative national editions, one for each country.
WThe Fashion was a website and discovery platform that existed from 2013 to 2016. It aggregated a multitude of fashion sites into one interface. Its aim was to provide users a streamlined shopping experience. The Fashion maintained localized sites for users in the United Kingdom, United States and Denmark, and offered a selection from over 150 online shops with 1,000 brands, including hvisk jewelry and gotchyou. The company was headquartered in London and Copenhagen. Co-founder Kasper Vardup served as its CEO.
WFriends Reunited was a portfolio of social networking websites based upon the themes of reunion with research, dating and job-hunting. The first and eponymous website was created by a husband-and-wife team in the classic back-bedroom Internet start-up; it was the first online social network to achieve prominence in Britain, and it weathered the dotcom bust.
WGamePolitics.com was a blog which covered the politics of computer and video games. GamePolitics was launched by freelance journalist Dennis McCauley in March 2005. At the time, McCauley was the video game columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, a position he held from 1998 to 2009. Growing somewhat bored of writing video game reviews, McCauley created GamePolitics in order to track the political, legal and cultural impact of video games. The site was often referred to as GP by followers.
WGameTrailers (GT) was an American video gaming website created by Geoffrey R. Grotz and Brandon Jones in 2002. The website specialized in multimedia content, including trailers and gameplay footage of upcoming and recently released video games, as well as an array of original video content focusing on video games, including reviews, countdown shows, and other web series.
WGawker is an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers and based in New York City focusing on celebrities and the media industry. The blog promoted itself as "the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip." According to third-party web analytics provider SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month as of 2015. Founded in 2003, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.
WHuffPost Live was an Internet-based video streaming network run by news website the Huffington Post. The network produced original programming as well as live conversations among users via platforms such as Skype and Google+. Live content was previously streamed for 8 hours each weekday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST. Instead of the usual TV news format of individual "shows", the network is divided into shorter segments covering an individual story or topic from the parent website as well as other segments pertaining to a specific part of the site itself It launched on August 13, 2012. On January 8, 2016, Arianna Huffington announced that HuffPost Live would be scaled back to reorganize the Huffington Post's video strategy toward more shareable online content. Ever since this reorganization, HuffPost Live's programming has consisted of rerun content from previous truly live shows combined with a varying number of new live celebrity interviews per day before the cessation of new live content on March 28, 2016.
WiTunes Radio was an Internet radio service by Apple Inc. that let users listen to automatically generated playlists based on direct input as well as collected data on music preferences. It was launched on September 18, 2013, as part of iOS 7 and was available in the Music app on iOS devices and Apple TV as well as in iTunes 11.1 on OS X and Windows. It was only available in the United States and Australia.
WKaymu Pakistan was an e-commerce portal based in Pakistan. In July 2016 Rocket Internet merged ecommerce site Kaymu into Daraz. Kaymu stopped its operations officially in Pakistan on 5 July 2017.
WKickassTorrents was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.
WKuro5hin was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could vote for or against publishing an article and once the article had reached a certain number of votes, it was published to the site or deleted from the queue. The site has been described as "a free-for-all of news and opinion written by readers". Around 2005, its membership numbered in the tens of thousands.
WLivestation was a platform for distributing live television and radio broadcasts over a data network. It was originally developed by Skinkers Ltd. and is now an independent company called Livestation Ltd. The service was originally based on peer-to-peer technology acquired from Microsoft Research. Between mid-June 2013 and mid-July Livestation was unavailable to some subscribers due to technical issues.
WMatchmaker.com was the first online dating service. It was founded in 1986 and first operated via a bulletin board system.
WMobli was a social mobile photo and video-sharing website founded by Israeli entrepreneurs and brothers Moshe and Oded Hogeg. As of 2016 the service was shut down and the company placed into bankruptcy.
WPanfu was a massively multiplayer online game for children aged between 6 and 14, involving a virtual world where players could create their own panda and explore the island of Panfu. Players were able to complete quests, play mini-games and chat with other pandas. According to the creators about 15,000 players registered daily on the German Panfu. Panfu was made available to the general public on December 1, 2007 – after a beta-testing-phase.
WPanoramio was a geo-located tagging, photo sharing mashup active between 2005 and 2016. Photos uploaded to the site were accessible as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps. The site's goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users had taken at that location. Panoramio was acquired by Google in 2007. In 2009 the website was among 1000 most popular websites worldwide.
WShelfari was a social cataloging website. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions, and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read.
WShift was an online live-streaming video network run by MSNBC. It was launched in July 2014 to provide a platform for original video series which diverge from the MSNBC television network's political focus.
WTakePart was a website operated by Participant Media, a motion picture studio that focuses on issues of social justice. TakePart was founded in 2008 to promote Participant Media's films as well as make viewers aware of the social advocacy efforts of Participant's outreach partners. The operation has shut down.
WThe Toast was an American anthology, humor and feminist writing website, founded by editors Nicole Cliffe and Daniel M. Lavery and publisher Nicholas Pavich. It was active from January 2013 through July 2016.
WTorrentz was a Finland-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy, and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed torrents from various major torrent websites, and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.
WxoJane was an American online magazine from 2011-2016 geared toward women and founded by Jane Pratt and co-published by Say Media. Pratt was the founding editor of Sassy and Jane magazines.
WThe company Yahoo! ran several similar video services. Yahoo! Video, a video hosting service, was established in 2006. Later, the ability to upload videos was removed, changing it to a more pure video on demand service; the website became a portal for curated video content hosted by Yahoo's properties. In 2011, the service was re-launched as Yahoo! Screen, placing a larger focus on original content and web series. Created for the service were the series Burning Love, Electric City, Ghost Ghirls, Losing It with John Stamos, Sin City Saints, and Other Space. Yahoo! Screen also acquired the sitcom Community for an additional season, following its cancellation after the fifth season on NBC. In January 2016, following a $42 million write-down on the poor performance of its original content, Yahoo! Screen was shut down. In August 2016, Yahoo! announced a partnership with the subscription video-on-demand service Hulu to move its free video library to a de facto successor known as Yahoo! View. Yahoo! View streamed recent episodes of television series from the ABC, NBC, and Fox networks in the United States, as well as a moderate selection of archived programs from various distributors, the "skinny bundle" model. Yahoo! View was decommissioned on June 30, 2019.