From the Facebook page of the Climategate.com operator:
Climategate is closing down
I am very sorry to bring you the news today that climategate.com is shutting down.
It started out as a minor little “hour a day” hobby last December after I purchased the domain name, and it turned into a monster of a site, causing me to work on it every spare hour of my day, every day. I just could no longer justify the time spent with literally pennies to a few dollars in ad revenue coming in a day. I do very much appreciate the generous donations some people made along the way, which helped with the expensive dedicated server the huge traffic required.
I spent many hours the last two weeks trying to find a solution to keeping the site going, either putting it on autopilot somehow or making a decent revenue stream off of it. I just could not do it. Believe me, I really tried.
It wasn’t fair to my family that I had my face buried in my computer all day and night. It felt like I was on a treadmill and could not get off. And I also owed it to my family to earn some income somewhere instead of just working on “the cause” all the time.
So, that’s what happened. Again, I’m really sorry.
Thank you all for everything.”
“This domain name had a web site with 570 posts, 6000 comments, a PR4 rating and Alexa rank of about 70,000, when I parked it on 3/11/10. I started the site in December 09. Just got burned out with such a popular site and had to move on to other things. The entire WordPress site is still on my server and will be saved for a buyer if they are interested.
First $100,000 takes it.
================
Heh. He doesn’t know the meaning of hard work.
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O/T Good news from another battle front. It seems a Wisconsin judge actually upheld an Amish Farmer’s Constitutional rights. Maybe American farmers will continue to be allowed to continue to farm and provide cheap food for all of us. However we expect a switch to another line of attack.
“Clark Co. Judge Rules in Favor of Amish in Premises ID Case
Wisconsin Ag Connection – 03/10/2010
A decision has finally been made in the highly anticipated case in which the State of Wisconsin was trying to sue an Amish man for not following Wisconsin’s Livestock Premise Registration law. On Tuesday, Clark County Circuit Court Judge Jon Counsell ruled that Emanuel Miller Jr. of Loyal does have a ‘religious right’ to be exempt from the law, which requires anyone who keeps, houses, or co-mingles livestock to register their premises with the state.”
The State of course will appeal the decision. http://nonais.org/2010/03/11/wi-judge-kills-premise-id/
:
Awww, come on guys – are you saying for £100K, you *wouldn’t*?
@dearieme (07:45:14) :
But what about the zillions that Exxon must pay him?????
I am loling/rolling on the floor here… that was perfect.
So where are those “Big Oil” folks I keep hearing about.
Perhaps, Climategate.com can apply for NSF funding.
Folks – for those without a sarcasm subroutine I think he is joking about the 100k….
It was a great site and will be missed. I checked it every day. Good luck!
Well, that explains all the WIndmills of You Mind hooey I saw when I went there yesterday.
Thanks for the update, Anthony.
Doc_Navy (08:44:07) :
On a related topic, I just sent off a letter to USA Today about…
————
Reply:
Great letter, Doc! I just wish USA would publish it. I’m afraid they probalby just circular-filed it.
hehe, why does google only give me climate guadalajuara when I type c..l..i..m…?
Who invented this internet thing anyways? Al Gore?
1DandyTroll (07:50:49) :
The sites been running for 120 days, from his description he’s been putting in a lot of time and effort so lets assume its 4 hours a day 7 days a week (he has to also earn money from a proper job). That means he put in 3360 hours of effort into the site. If he’s selling it for $100,000 then that is less than $30 per hour and excludes any running costs. A professional IT contractor who works for themselves will charge anything from $60 to $200 per hour. The $100,000 price tag is cheap and represents a reasonable return for the effort he’s put in.
Really sorry to hear you close – thought it was a great site – so much on there in such a short time. Great work.
Ref – Mark Rose (08:29:55) :
“I could run that on a Pentium II machine.
“I have a site that does 1 million PHP scripts per day (and 10 million images) that I used to run on a single core Celeron. And it pushes about 50 to 60 GB/day. Cost to run? $69 US a month.
“This guy is an incompetent system administrator if he can’t run that site on a $69/mn box.”
______________________
You sure know a lot about the ‘system’. It seems you could have run his ‘system’ for him and saved him a lot of time and money. Shame isn’t it? Life’s a beach.
Maybe you will help some other hero some day.
Anthony,
Please tell us you kept the domain?
Chuckle !!!
We know who the big dog is here !!!
Keep up the great work Anthony (and staff)
I guess that it’s insanity to talk about $100,000 if the website produces $0.50 a day or so and the revenue is guaranteed to drop as the keyword becomes less “current”.
If the person did it for the money, then the AGW movement is the most likely to buy such a domain, for propagandistic reasons. In that case, I would consider the guy who sold them the domain a traitor, and I would find it reasonable to see him or her on the same electric chair as Al Gore because it’s really the same kind of mentality – mentality of abusing the science for the money.
Scratch that- I didn’t read the rest of the article.
@Doc_Navy (08:44:07) :
It’s just like my chances of winning millions in the lottery. I either win or I don’t. That makes the odds 50/50, right? Either 2010 will be the hottest year ever or it won’t.
And you guys think Mann doesn’t understand statistics.
So, $100,000 for 3 months of “hard” work. Not a bad return.
TerryS (09:25:58),
The proper way to value a business is by its anticipated future revenue stream. The time invested is irrelevant.
No offence, but no one forced you to buy that domain name and run that site. If hosting is too much for you, then just host it on a blogger.com site just like wattsupwiththat.com so you don’t need to worry about traffic costs. Otherwise donate it to someone who will make good use of it to raise people’s awareness about the climate lies.
Chances are someone is going to pay him the asked for $100k and replace it with Pro-AGW “debunking”.
I seem to vaguely recall an anti-cult website that was sued into the dirt by the Church of Scientology that is now owned by them and, again if I recall correct, now explains to visitors how the CoS is not a cult.
Call my cynical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Fenton Communications already has their checkbook out.
I really don’t understand why this posting on WUWT was even highlighted, followed by Anthony’s commentary. First, it’s not great publicity for the “cause,” and it seems like a chance for WUWT to plug their own stats. Again. Seems like WUWT must be having a slow news day to gloat, yes, it comes across as gloating, over the demise of another skeptical website.
Speaking of Alexa rankings and such, WUWT readers may be interested in the following two new articles on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Up_With_That
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeSmogBlog
Note that if you go to the Alexa site you can generate graphs to compare the stats of these two. Its funny to see, IMHO. You can also add in climateaudit.org and realclimate.org for the full picture.
If you have any interest in how Wikipedia’s coverage of the AGW debate comes to be, simply follow the talk page discussions for the above two blogs. They should give you a micro-view into the machinations that occur there.
There’s also a mini-debate happening on the talk page of Jimbo Wales (one of the co-founders of Wikipedia) concerning the treatment of the biographies of the climate change skeptics vs. the AGW disciples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_wales
When Anthony last posted about William Connolley’s biography on Wikipedia I got the idea to create a blog dedicated to helping the average Joe and Jane get some idea of how the Wikipedia pages got to be such a mess. You can find this at: http://pediawatch.wordpress.com/
A few of the regular Wikipedia editors and I will be making occasional comments there for those with a passing interest in how Wikipedia covers the whole Climate Change debate. This will likely be a low traffic blog so the best way to follow along would be to simply add it to your favorite news readers and occasionally some tidbit will pop up.
Don’t know if i can trust the website i will be referring to, but apparantly he bought the domain-name in december for $10,099
http://domainnamewire.com/2009/12/07/climategate-com-domain-name-sells/
I agree that family comes first, but for the cause of that website he could have made a different decesion when selling, for example ask the initial cost as the price.
I think the domain is worth more if its active.