The famed filesharing news website is now entering week 4 of its downtime. With no further signs of life, it’s hard to say if the site is ever coming back.
We’ve been monitoring the website for signs of life for over a month now. It’s almost hard to believe, but last week, we noted that the site has been more or less down for three weeks running now.
Earlier that week, we noticed that it is possible to access the homepage. While it is possible to access the https version of the homepage, but the page is largely broken. Still, we remained vigilant, monitoring for any further signs of life.
Now, we have entered week four of this downtime. At this point, it brings into serious question whether or not the site is ever going to make a return. At this point in time, the downed webpages will lose page ranking (if they still have any at all at this point). That potentially translates into a loss of potential traffic to the page in and of itself.
In addition, it’s going to get harder and harder for more hardcore fans of the site to keep watching and waiting to see if the site will ever make a return. Some may continue to hold out hope, but others will eventually move on.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the home page currently contains no ads. While that may sound like a good thing on the surface, no money is likely flowing into the site at all. With a lack of cash, it does increase the challenge of bringing the site back in the first place.
At this point, it is hard to say if the site is ever going to make a comeback at this stage. Administration is active, but actively doing things outside of ZeroPaid. All this does make it difficult to really gauge what potential plans are for the site.
For me, the biggest surprise is that the admins decided to not make the domain name redirect to a specialized welcome page for one of the other projects administration has on the go. If the site is to be shut down, at the very least, all that potential traffic would have proven to be a great benefit to another website project.
Another possibility is that the site is to go dormant for an extended period of time, then have it re-branded at a later time and relaunch the site. At that point, who knows when the site will come back and who knows if a re-launch like that would even work. The longer the site remains dormant, the taller the order that would be.
What we do know is that a single fully functional page is all that is left of the site. Beyond that, the site is showing no signs of life otherwise. So while we can’t say the site is dead completely, we also can’t say the site is alive either.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
