Student puts popular Web
site up for sale
By Matt Lindner
Assistant
Campus Editor
Will Smith, a senior in the School of Technology
and owner of the Web site www.drunkatcollege.com, recently caused yet
another stir among the student body when he announced through the site
that he was putting it up for auction on eBay.
However, the sale didn't last long, because three
days later Smith removed the site from auction, choosing to turn over
the site to his friend Jack Nichols.
Smith said there were a variety of reasons for
putting the site up for sale.
"It got to a point where the cost of hosting the
Web site became too great, and it was just deviating from what I originally
wanted the site to be," he said. "As time went on, a lot of the traffic
on the site was coming from people looking for pornographic material
rather than students sharing stories about their experiences at parties."
When word got out that Smith's site was for sale,
students and advertisers took notice.
"The response I got from people willing to help
me pay for the site was incredible," Smith said. "A lot of students
and companies emailed me saying that they wanted to help me out financially
in any way they could. The companies in particular wanted to advertise
on the site because it got such a large amount of views from college
students."
The bidding for Smith's site got as high as $300
before he decided to take it down. Ebay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said
that Smith's site might not have received the bidding that he was hoping
for because buying and selling domain names just isn't as popular as
it once was.
"The novelty of buying a Web site has worn off
since the Internet became more popular and easily accessible," he said.
"Also, since the economy is rather slow right now people aren't spending
great amounts of money to purchase a new Web site."
Even after the bidding was over with, Smith was
receiving private bids that were as high as $600 but decided against
selling because he felt as though the site would be better off in the
hands of a student.
"I would rather give it to someone else who could
keep it more student-oriented, and not allow it to become a pornographic
Web site as some who made bids had suggested," Smith said. "I still
retain the rights to the site domain name; however, (Nichols) will be
taking over the design and content aspects of the site."
Nichols, a senior in the School of Technology,
said that the site is an extremely popular one.
"Right now we average about 3.5 million visits
a month," he said. "We actually had to switch to a new server because
we were taking up so much bandwidth on our current one that our presence
on the servers actually slowed the other sites down a great deal."
He said the popularity of the site is due to a
number of factors.
"Drunkatcollege.com is definitely something that
deviates from the societal norms," Nichols said. "It shows Purdue from
a student's perspective and college life for what it actually is, rather
than the sanitized version that is shown on the University's site."
The newer version of drunkatcollege.com should
be up within the next week as Smith and Nichols transfer the site to
a new server.
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