Who owns Snopes? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Snopes is the oldest and best known fact-checking site on the internet. It began in 1994 as an urban-legends reference page run by a married couple out of their home, and it grew into a destination that millions of people visit to check whether a viral claim, a doctored image, or a political rumor is true. For most of its life the site was a small, founder-owned operation rather than a media company with a boardroom.

That changed over a bruising decade. A divorce, a contested stock sale, a multi-year lawsuit, an emergency crowdfunding campaign, and a plagiarism scandal all reshaped who controls Snopes. The company that started as a two-person passion project is now owned by a pair of media entrepreneurs who arrived as commercial partners and stayed as owners.

Understanding that ownership matters because a fact-checking outlet lives or dies on trust. Who signs the checks, who sets editorial policy, and who profits from the traffic are fair questions to ask of any organization that tells the public what is true. This article traces the chain from the site's founders to the two men who own it today.

Snopes was created in 1994 by David Mikkelson and his then-wife Barbara Mikkelson. The couple met through the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, and David took the handle "Snopes" from a family of characters in William Faulkner's novels. What began as the Urban Legends Reference Pages became snopes.com, a searchable archive that debunked chain emails, hoaxes, and myths long before "fake news" entered the vocabulary.

In 2003 the Mikkelsons incorporated the business as Bardav, Inc., a name stitched together from Barbara and David, to hold and operate the site as its traffic and advertising income grew. The operation has long been based in the United States, with its work reported out of Tacoma, Washington. Today the site is run day to day by Snopes, Inc., a subsidiary of the parent holding company, Snopes Media Group, Inc.

Snopes remains a private company, so it publishes no audited revenue or valuation figures. Its business model rests on advertising against a large base of search and social traffic, plus a membership program and reader contributions that the company built out to reduce its dependence on ads. Snopes also spent several years as a paid third-party fact-checking partner for Facebook, a relationship that is no longer active. The most concrete public financial markers are its crowdfunding totals and the fees it once received from Facebook, rather than any company-wide profit or valuation number.

Snopes has never been a venture-backed startup or a public company. There are no VC rounds, no institutional shareholders, and no ticker symbol. Ownership has always sat with a small number of individuals, first the two founders and now the two current owners, held through the private corporate vehicles that operate the site. Because the company is private and has raised no equity, there is no disclosed valuation, the kind of figure a business valuation calculator would normally help frame for an outside investor.

For its first two decades, Snopes was owned equally by David and Barbara Mikkelson through Bardav, Inc., with each holding 50%. The founders' marriage ended around 2014, and the divorce set the ownership crisis in motion by splitting a company that had always been controlled by one household.

In July 2016, Barbara Mikkelson sold her 50% stake. The buyer was a group connected to Proper Media, a San Diego digital-media firm that already handled Snopes's web development, hosting, and advertising. That transaction put half of Snopes in the hands of commercial partners and left David Mikkelson with the other half, an arrangement that quickly turned adversarial. Neither founder retains any ownership today. David Mikkelson sold his remaining shares and left the company in 2022, and Barbara had exited years earlier.

The individuals behind the Proper Media purchase included Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, the firm's co-founders, along with other members. Buying Barbara's shares gave them a 50% stake and, through Proper Media's service contract, effective control over the site's technical operations and ad revenue.

The partnership collapsed within months. In March 2017, David Mikkelson moved to terminate Proper Media's operating agreement. Proper Media responded by withholding advertising revenue, and the two sides sued each other in San Diego Superior Court. Snopes alleged that Proper Media was starving it of its own ad income and blocking access to its site and accounts. The fight over money and control ran for years.

Snopes has never raised institutional funding, so it has no conventional financing table. Its "rounds" were crowdfunding drives and commercial payments, not equity sales. The table below summarizes the money that is publicly documented.

The ownership question was settled in September 2022. Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup acquired the founders' remaining shares and took full ownership of Snopes Media Group, Inc. Reporting on the deal describes Richmond holding roughly 60% and Schoentrup roughly 40%, though the company has not published exact figures and the purchase price was not disclosed. The two are longtime business partners who have bought and operated other content properties, and they arrived at Snopes first as service providers and investors before becoming its sole owners.

Chris Richmond is the chief executive and the larger of the two owners. He became CEO on September 16, 2022, the day David Mikkelson stepped down from the role and the board. Richmond had already sat on the Snopes board since the 2016 Proper Media transaction, so his move into the top job formalized control that had been contested for years. As majority owner and CEO, he is the single most influential decision-maker at the company.

Drew Schoentrup is Richmond's business partner and the minority owner, holding a reported stake of around 40%. He co-founded Proper Media with Richmond and has been involved with Snopes since the 2016 purchase. Together the two run the parent company as a closely held private business, with no outside shareholders to answer to.

David Mikkelson remained a co-owner and CEO through the entire legal battle and even after the 2021 plagiarism revelations, but he sold his stake and departed both the CEO seat and the board in September 2022. Barbara Mikkelson left when she sold her 50% in 2016. Neither founder holds equity or an operating role today, ending nearly three decades of founder involvement in the company they built.

Day-to-day fact-checking is run by an editorial team that operates separately from the ownership. Snopes has emphasized that its editorial staff work independently of its commercial side, a separation that matters more for a fact-checker than for most media businesses. In 2025, a group of Snopes editorial staff moved to unionize with the Media Guild of the West, a sign of a newsroom that now functions as an organized workforce rather than a founder's side project.

The defining controversy in Snopes's ownership history was the 2017 to 2020 legal war with Proper Media. After David Mikkelson cut off the firm's operating role in early 2017, Proper Media withheld the site's advertising revenue, and the company said it could not access its own funds for months. Snopes turned to crowdfunding to keep the lights on and pay lawyers. In 2017 a San Diego court sided with Snopes on key points, ordering disputed ad revenue released and declining to remove Mikkelson as a director. The litigation dragged on before the parties ultimately settled, with Richmond stating that all disputes were amicably resolved by the time of the 2022 buyout.

In August 2021, BuzzFeed News reported that David Mikkelson had plagiarized material in dozens of Snopes articles between 2015 and 2019, including work published under a staff pseudonym. Snopes conducted an internal review, retracted around 60 articles, and suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties. Notably, he kept his role as an officer and 50% shareholder at the time, a split that underscored how ownership and editorial credibility had come apart. The episode was serious for a site whose entire value rests on accuracy, and it fed criticism that Snopes needed cleaner governance.

As a private, ad-supported fact-checker, Snopes has faced recurring questions about bias and about who funds it. Critics across the political spectrum have accused the site of slanting its verdicts, and the company has responded by publishing its methodology, sourcing, and funding model. Its past paid partnership with Facebook drew particular scrutiny, since taking money from a platform it also fact-checked created an obvious conflict to manage. Snopes has argued that editorial decisions are made independently of its commercial and ownership interests.

Snopes depends heavily on advertising revenue and on traffic from search engines and social platforms it does not control. That dependence is a business risk as much as a controversy. When Proper Media withheld ad income in 2017, the company nearly ran out of cash. When platforms change their algorithms or wind down fact-checking programs, as Meta did with its US program in 2025, Snopes feels it directly. The push into memberships and reader donations is a deliberate hedge against that exposure.

Ownership matters at Snopes because the company sells trust, and trust is sensitive to who is in charge. A reader deciding whether to believe a Snopes verdict is, in effect, extending credit to the people who own and run it. The shift from two founders to two media entrepreneurs changed the incentives behind the site, from a personal reference project into a business that must generate returns for its owners while protecting the credibility that makes it valuable.

The private structure gives the current owners freedom that a public company would not have. Richmond and Schoentrup answer to no outside shareholders, no venture investors demanding growth, and no quarterly earnings calls. That independence can protect editorial judgment from short-term financial pressure, similar to how reader-funded and independent media outlets like Ground News position themselves against advertiser influence. It also concentrates power in two people, with no external board or public disclosure to check them, so the burden of maintaining trust falls entirely on their governance choices.

The funding model is the other lever. Because Snopes leans on advertising and on reader support rather than deep-pocketed backers, its owners have an incentive to keep traffic high and members paying. The company's crowdfunding history shows how directly it can appeal to its audience for money, using GoFundMe in its cash crisis and later building its own membership system. That reader-supported approach echoes the creator-funding logic of platforms like Patreon, and it aligns the owners' financial interest with keeping readers loyal, which for a fact-checker means staying accurate and being seen as fair.

For users, the practical takeaway is that Snopes is a for-profit private business, not a nonprofit or a public trust. That is different from a volunteer-run or donation-based reference project like Wikipedia, and it means the site's survival depends on revenue as much as on reputation. The two are linked. If readers stop trusting the verdicts, the traffic and memberships that fund the company go with them, which gives the owners a commercial reason to protect the very independence that makes Snopes worth reading.

Snopes is owned by Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, who together hold 100% of the parent company, Snopes Media Group, Inc. Reporting on the 2022 buyout describes Richmond owning roughly 60% and Schoentrup roughly 40%. It is a private company with no outside or institutional shareholders.

Chris Richmond is the CEO. He took the role on September 16, 2022, when co-founder David Mikkelson stepped down as chief executive and left the board. Richmond is also the majority owner, making him the company's most influential decision-maker.

Snopes was founded in 1994 by David Mikkelson and his then-wife Barbara Mikkelson, who ran it as the Urban Legends Reference Pages before it became snopes.com. They incorporated the business as Bardav, Inc. in 2003. Neither founder owns or works at the company today.

No. Snopes is a privately held company with no stock listing and no venture-capital funding. It has never sold equity to institutional investors, so there are no public shares to buy and no disclosed market valuation.

When Barbara Mikkelson sold her 50% stake to a Proper Media group in 2016, it triggered a control fight. After David Mikkelson ended Proper Media's operating role in 2017, the firm withheld ad revenue, and both sides sued in San Diego. Snopes crowdfunded more than $1.7 million for legal costs, won early court rulings, and the dispute was ultimately settled by the time Richmond and Schoentrup bought full ownership in 2022.

Snopes earns money from programmatic advertising, paid memberships, reader donations, and merchandise, rather than from investors. It has never raised equity funding. Its most visible cash injections were crowdfunding campaigns that together exceeded $1.7 million and fees of roughly $100,000 in 2017 and $406,000 in 2018 from a since-ended Facebook fact-checking partnership.