As a result of financial difficulties stemming from a lack of advertising revenue, JuicyCampus.com Founder and CEO Matt Ivester officially shutdown the highly controversial college gossip Web site yesterday.
“In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved,” Ivester explained in an online interview posted on the Web site. “Juicy Campus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn.”
Assoc. Media Studies Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan explained the economics behind the site’s closing.
“With any web-based business, there’s ratio of expenses to income,” he said. “One of the big expenses of any site that wants to generate traffic is bandwidth. The more people that use your site, the more expensive it is to run it, and the only thing to offset that is persistent flow from advertisers.”
Vaidhyanathan cited Facebook and YouTube as other Web sites that share the same funding model as Juicy Campus. He explained that despite the hundreds of advertisers that fund sites such as these, because of the number of users, their bandwidth costs are too expensive for them to retain a profit.
“People don’t take into account that if you do generate attention, it’s going to cost you a lot of money before you make dollar one,” Vaidhyanathan said, adding that Juicy Campus “had a great deal of coverage because of the invitation to scandal that if offered, but basically it was uninteresting and embarrassing to the degree that advertisers clearly had very little incentive to pay for space on the site.” “It was such a repulsive product. There was no reason to believe that it would grow into a sustainable business.”
University students who had been the subject of some of the gossip site’s posts shared a more personal opinion about Juicy Campus’ closure. A first-year student affiliated with Delta Delta Delta sorority said she believed the Web site should have been shut down for moral reasons, not financial ones.
“I was not in favor of [Juicy Campus] at all because people could post whatever they liked, no consequences,” she said, speaking on a condition of anonymity because of her name’s former appearance on the site. “It’s not an important Web site that’s promoting anything good or benefiting anyone.”
Regarding the posts about her, she said, “I was kind of upset. I felt like my privacy was invaded. I tried to delete it, but I couldn’t.”
Another third-year student, who also wished to remain anonymous, said she reacted differently when she first read what other people had posted about her.
“I thought it was hilarious,” she said. “My friends and I all made ‘Juicy Campus Celebrity’ T-shirts. I felt so bad for those people that all they could do was trash talk [on the Web site]. I think it’s another ploy for people who are insecure to lash out and make themselves feel better.”
When the Web site debuted, it was subject to much negative media attention and also targeted by several student groups across the nation, including the University’s Student Council. Though the site has now closed, Ivester still defends what he set out to accomplish by starting it in the first place.
“I’d like to thank everyone who has engaged in meaningful discussion about online privacy and internet censorship,” he stated. “Juicy Campus has raised issues that have passionate advocates on both sides, and I hope that dialogue will continue. While there are parts of Juicy Campus that none of us will miss — the mean-spirited posts and personal attacks — it has also been a place for the fun, lighthearted gossip of college life.”
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