eBaum's World
The early-2000s comedy and media dump every kid browsed instead of doing homework. Flash cartoons, prank-call soundboards, funny clips, and simple games — all stamped with the site's inescapable watermark, which became the running joke and the scandal at once.
eBaum's World was started by Eric "eBaum" Bauman, who began collecting and posting comedy clips as a high schooler in Rochester, New York, in the late 1990s. Through the early 2000s it grew by word of mouth into one of the web's biggest time-wasters — a grab bag of Flash animations, soundboards, viral videos, and games that thrived on school computers everywhere.
It was also notorious. The site became infamous for reposting other people's content and slapping its own watermark on it. In January 2006 that boiled over when an animation was lifted from the site YTMND and re-watermarked as eBaum's, kicking off a feud that spilled into DDoS attacks and death threats; the same year it was caught reposting material from Something Awful and Albino Blacksheep without credit. The watermark itself became the internet's shorthand for stolen content.
In August 2007, eBaum's World was sold to HandHeld Entertainment for $15 million up front plus a large stock-and-earnout package. The rise of YouTube soon made a curated clip site feel obsolete, and its cultural moment passed. The domain still exists — now under Literally Media — but its heyday was that pre-YouTube stretch of the 2000s when everyone had seen the same eBaum's video.
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