GoFish
video sharing website

GoFish was a San Francisco-based online video sharing website founded in 2003 by Michael Downing. It was founded as a search engine for digital music, audio books, ringtones and other media online, and operated as GoFish until 2009 then the service became the advertising network BetaWave in 2009 after a failed attempt at changing their niche into children's media. In 2010, BetaWave had also shutdown after "running out of money".
GoFish was an important step in content distribution, as it was one of the first mainstream video sharing websites. In 2005, YouTube and Google Video launched, which may have taken some of GoFish's audience. Towards the end of its service, the site had close to 20 million users.
GoFish used Java with the Apache Tomcat web server to drive their website, and used either PostgreSQL or Oracle as their backend database.
History
In 2003, GoFish was founded, and went public on the OTC Bulletin Board
In February 2007, GoFish Corporation attempted a merger with Bolt.com, but later dropped the deal as their stock plummeted.
At one point in mid 2007, GoFish was the home to web television such as MMA Today (), which offered highlights from various Mixed Martial Arts events as well as Hidden Celebrity Cams. The shows were known as "Made For Internet".
“GoFish” enters the record as video sharing website. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what GoFish, video and sharing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“GoFish” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, GoFish, video and sharing provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28130447. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2009, 2010 and 2005.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “GoFish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.