ScienceBlogs

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006 with a simple but ambitious premise: gather the best independent science writers on the internet and give them a home, a platform, and almost no rules. Seed Media Group, the company behind the experiment, did not impose editorial control. Bloggers could write about whatever they wished. The result was something unexpected. A network built to help the public understand science quickly became one of the loudest, most contentious corners of the web.

  At its peak, ScienceBlogs drew over 1.1 million unique visitors every month. It ranked 37th among all blogs worldwide by inbound links. It won awards, spawned international editions, and hosted names that would become well known in science communication. Then, in June 2010, a sponsored blog paid for by PepsiCo nearly tore the whole thing apart. What does it mean for a science network to sell space to a snack company? How does a community built on editorial independence survive when that independence is suddenly for sale? And what finally brought ScienceBlogs to its end in October 2017?

• 2. Building the Network

  ›

  Before ScienceBlogs existed, a site called ScienceBlog.com already occupied the territory. Seed Media Group approached that existing network about a possible partnership, but the talks went nowhere. Seed went ahead anyway, launching independently under a strikingly similar name and web address in January 2006 with 15 blogs on the network.

  The founding strategy was direct: find the best-known independent science bloggers and invite them in. Authors came from a wide range of backgrounds, including active scientists in industry, university researchers, medical school faculty, physicians, graduate students, and professional writers. Each blog kept its own theme, its own specialty, and its own voice. No one from Seed told them what to cover.

  Revenue came from advertisers who wanted to reach what Seed described as bright, curious consumers who buy products like automobiles, books, cellphones, computers, liquor, music, and watches. That framing would later prove ironic. The same audience that made ScienceBlogs valuable to advertisers was the audience that would revolt when it felt the line between advertising and editorial had been crossed.

• 3. Awards and Early Reach

  ›

  By the end of their first year, ScienceBlogs and Seed had earned real recognition. Seed received the 2006 UTNE Independent Press Award for Best Science/Technology Coverage, with the award tied directly to what ScienceBlogs had built. Two individual blogs on the network also won Weblog Awards that year. Pharyngula took Best Science Blog, and Respectful Insolence won Best Medical/Health Issues Blog.

  The network expanded in three major waves, with individual blogs added in between. Among the most trafficked were Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence, Good Math Bad Math, Deltoid, Cognitive Daily, Living the Scientific Life, and On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess. The community grew internationally too. A German-language edition, ScienceBlogs.de, launched in 2008 through a partnership with Hubert Burda Media and hosted 35 blogs by December 2010. ScienceBlogs Brazil followed in March 2009 with 23 Portuguese-language blogs.

  By the time Quantcast measured its traffic, 65 percent of the site's monthly unique visitors were coming from the United States, with the rest spread globally. Technorati assigned ScienceBlogs an authority score of 9,581, a measure of how widely the site was cited and linked across the web.

• 4. The PepsiGate Crisis

  ›

  In June 2010, ScienceBlogs launched a blog called Food Frontiers. It was sponsored by PepsiCo and written by PepsiCo employees. The reaction from the network's own bloggers was immediate and harsh. Many considered it an unethical blending of advertising and journalism, the kind of arrangement that undermined everything that had made ScienceBlogs worth reading in the first place.

  PepsiCo's blog was pulled, but the damage spread faster than Seed's response. By the middle of July, roughly a quarter of the network's bloggers had left. PZ Myers of Pharyngula, one of the network's most prominent voices, announced he was going on strike. Myers publicly described the situation in blunt terms, saying the ship is sinking. A writer at the New York Times Magazine reviewed the incident and wrote that ScienceBlogs had become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd.

  The fallout helped birth competing networks. Scientopia.org and ScienceSeeker.org launched during this period, and The Guardian started its own hosted science blogging network. Yet the story did not end in 2010. By early 2015, eleven of the blogs that had been on ScienceBlogs since its founding year in 2006 were still active, including Myers's Pharyngula. On the 24th of January 2015, nineteen blogs across the whole network had seen new posts in the preceding month.

• 5. National Geographic and Decline

  ›

  In April 2011, National Geographic took over operational control of ScienceBlogs. Seed retained ownership of the site, but National Geographic gained editorial oversight and responsibility for advertising sales. The arrangement brought a large institutional partner into a network that had been defined by its independence from exactly that kind of institutional hand.

  The site continued hosting 75 blogs dedicated to various research fields, organized into ten content channels. Bloggers themselves decided which channel each post belonged in, from Life Science and Environment to Politics and Technology. That decentralized structure had always been part of ScienceBlogs's appeal, but it could not hold the network together indefinitely.

  On the 14th of October 2017, astrophysics blogger Steinn Sigurðsson publicly announced that ScienceBlogs was due to shut down. David Gorski, who wrote the Respectful Insolence blog under the pseudonym Orac, stated that ScienceBlogs had barely existed as an entity for a few years. Eight days later, on the 22nd of October 2017, astrophysics blogger Ethan Siegel reported that the site had told its bloggers it no longer had the funds to keep operating. ScienceBlogs shut down at the end of October 2017, closing out an eleven-year run.

• 6. Aftermath

  ›

  The story did not end cleanly in October 2017. In late August 2018, visitors to the ScienceBlogs front page found a notice announcing that the site was now part of the Science 2.0 family, with plans in place to make it active again. Whether that revival materialized fully, the notice itself signaled that someone still saw value in the ScienceBlogs name.

  The network had won a 2012 IQ Award during its later years, adding to the recognition it had accumulated from its first year. The names that passed through ScienceBlogs, from PZ Myers to Ethan Siegel to David Gorski, went on to remain visible in science communication long after the platform itself went quiet. Siegel's reporting on the shutdown in October 2017, citing the site's own words to its bloggers about lacking funds, stands as the clearest documentation of why one of the web's most-linked science communities eventually went dark.