OhInternet
OhInternet was a poorly-conceived replacement for Encyclopaedia Dramatica, and a blatant Know Your Meme ripoff, designed to appeal to the internet savvy, yet easily offended 18-34 year old demographic. Amazingly, without even using a single picture of a mutilated penis, the site had managed to be even more insulting and offending than its predecessor. First, it's about as funny as the rotting corpse of a dead infant, and looks just as awful: as any competent web designer will tell you, you should always try to stuff as many ads in the page as possible, at the cost of content and repelling any and all visitors. Second, create a site dedicated to recording internet phenomena, while dumbing down the information so that elderly grandmothers and 50-something year old advertising agents (two groups that are obviously very knowledgeable about internet culture) can understand it. Add even more ads pandering to "counter cultural" 18-34 year olds, and finally, alienate 99.99% of your userbase, thereby substantially reducing the amount of people who click on your advertisements. Now, you have a recipe for disaster.
Safe for Work[edit]
In order to draw advertisers, and pay for their new servers, OhInternet insisted that all of their articles be strictly Safe For Work. This eliminated all the racism, sexism, homophobia, and extreme religious prejudice. Except where it draws advertisers. It also eliminated most of the jokes at others expense, cyberbullying, all of the cursing, and anything that isn't politically correct or might offend an elderly grandmother or an irate boss (who is already irate that his company's computers were used for any purpose besides working). Except where it draws advertisers. In other words, it was similar to the old "What-Port-80" but without the rainbowy childish art at the top. Because childish art doesn't draw advertisers. Except maybe Fisher Price.
Alienating your Userbase and Influencing Advertisers[edit]
It is difficult to troll a troll, or offend someone as jaded as an ED user, but OhInternet managed to do both of these with astonishing success. First by eliminating the forums promoting trolling, and secondly by removing virtually all of the articles related to trolling, as well as the offensive content that attracted most of ED's immature user base in the first place, most of whom are regular frequenters of 4chan. Which explained a lot when you think about it.
The fact that they are regular frequenters of 4chan means that they do not have any interest in porn ads, especially if it involves paying money, when they can get their porn on 4chan for FREE. Also, ED was like a secret addiction to site readers who are over 25 or have a job, or religious relatives, since most corporate employers and religious relatives tend to frown on offensive content, shock images, grotesque photos, and porn (ie about 99% of ED's content). Thus, there was little or no interest in ED T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other merchandise.
No business, even a nonprofit, can survive for long in the red, and the old ED was no different. ED was maintained by donations from its surprisingly generous fan base, but even generosity tends to run out eventually. On April 15th 2011, ED was swallowed up by OhInternet. OhInternet was designed with a purely business motive, and disregarding what the old userbase of ED was all about. All of the old articles from ED were scrapped without warning. Oddly enough, OhInternet did not even import all the articles from WP80, the work-safe version of ED, which was developed side-by-side in the late stages of ED, but never attracted the attention of advertisers.
Anonymous of course, rebuilt ED from the ground up using Internet archives, Google cache, and other methods to restore their content, rejecting OhInternet. ED's former site owner refused to hand over ED.com's archives and domain name, and for this, Anonymous released embarrassing photos of her mooning the camera, and called her several epithets. None of this surprised anyone.
Gone[edit]
In October, 2013, OhInternet and its content vanished from the Internet without explanation. Pundits and anyone with common sense believe that the site was closed because it was unsuccessful. Know Your Meme is Google's site of choice for Internet memes, and Encyclopedia Dramatica remains the "go to" site for NSFW content.