Short answers, pulled from the story.
ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, created by Seed Media Group to enhance public understanding of science. It started with 15 blogs on the network and operated for eleven years before shutting down at the end of October 2017.
In June 2010, ScienceBlogs launched a blog called Food Frontiers, sponsored by PepsiCo and written by PepsiCo employees. Many bloggers considered this an unethical mix of advertising and journalism, and by mid-July roughly a quarter of the network's bloggers had left. PZ Myers of Pharyngula publicly said the ship was sinking, and the affair became known informally as PepsiGate.
Quantcast measured ScienceBlogs at over 1.1 million monthly unique visitors, with 65 percent coming from the United States. Technorati also ranked it 37th among all blogs worldwide by number of inbound links, with an authority score of 9,581.
On the 22nd of October 2017, astrophysics blogger Ethan Siegel reported that ScienceBlogs had told its bloggers it no longer had the funds to keep the site operational. The site shut down at the end of October 2017. David Gorski, who wrote the Respectful Insolence blog as Orac, stated the network had barely existed as an entity for a few years before the closure.
Seed received the 2006 UTNE Independent Press Award for Best Science/Technology Coverage, attributed in large part to ScienceBlogs. In the same year, Pharyngula won the Weblog Award for Best Science Blog and Respectful Insolence won Best Medical/Health Issues Blog. ScienceBlogs also received a 2012 IQ Award.
ScienceBlogs launched a German-language edition, ScienceBlogs.de, in 2008 in partnership with Hubert Burda Media, which hosted 35 blogs by December 2010. ScienceBlogs Brazil debuted in March 2009 with 23 Portuguese-language blogs.