Type of site Music website Owner AHH Holdings LLC | Available in English | |
Created by Greg Watkins
Chuck Creekmur Revenue US$4 million (as of 2007) Slogan(s) The world's most dangerous site | ||
AllHipHop is a hip hop news website founded in 1998. At five million visitors a month, it is the world's most popular hip hop website. Essence magazine has dubbed it "the CNN of hip-hop". In 2006, AllHipHop won the Rising Stars Award from Black Enterprise magazine. In 2007, PC Magazine listed it as one of the "Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites". As of May 2008, it attracts over 37 million page views a month.
History
High school friends Greg Watkins and Chuck Creekmur founded the website in 1998. Watkins and Creekmur grew up in Newark, Delaware. In 1997, Watkins registered the allhiphop.com domain to promote the artists on Oblique Recordings, a small record label he operated. The website provided music downloads to promote the label's artists. After reaching 30,000 downloads a month, Watkins struck deals with eMusic and other retailers to sell downloads. His friend Creekmur, a freelance journalist, had launched a website, tantrum-online.com, in New York City. After merging the companies, they adapted Trantrum's exclamation point logo for AllHipHop. By 2003, the business generated enough revenue for Watkins to quit his job and work on the website full-time. Creekmur did the same next year. In 2007, the revenue exceeded US$4 million.