ARKive

» see arkive.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ARKive was a film archive for endangered animals. Christopher Parsons had run the BBC Natural History Unit through the years that made "Life on Earth", and the idea he carried out of it was that the world's wildlife footage sat scattered across broadcasters and private collections, indexed by nobody, with no plan for the day the film stock aged out. His answer was one permanent online record per species on the IUCN Red List that held the best moving image and stills anyone would donate, set against a fact file checked by somebody who knew the animal. Wildscreen, the Bristol charity behind the wildlife film festival, took it on. The Heritage Lottery Fund put up two million pounds in 1997 and Hewlett-Packard built the platform, sized for up to 74 terabytes.

Parsons died of cancer in November 2002 at the age of 70 and never saw it open. The site launched on 20 May 2003 in the hands of David Attenborough, his colleague at the Natural History Unit for decades and Wildscreen's patron, with about a thousand species in it. By 2010 the count was past 12,000 species and 70,000 clips and photographs from 5,500 donors. At the end it held over 16,000 species and more than 100,000 images and videos, given by roughly 7,000 filmmakers and photographers who signed away usage for a project that charged nothing. The Sunday Times named it website of the year in 2005.

In 2003 I was at university in Ankara and reference still meant the Encarta disc for one more year before Wikipedia took the habit over entirely. Nobody I knew set out for a British conservation charity's species encyclopedia. You landed on it three clicks into an image search for an animal whose name you had just read, then stayed twenty minutes because the video turned out to be real footage instead of a stock clip. That is the whole category of site that the web quietly stopped producing.

Wildscreen put the notice up on 25 January 2019. Since 2013 it had not been able to raise enough from trusts and donors to cover the year-round cost, so it had been spending its reserves and running the site without dedicated staff for over half a decade. Visitor numbers had halved in five years. The homepage carried the line "The Arkive website will no longer be available after 15 February 2019" until the morning it went, and the last capture of it is from 09:06 UTC that day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eighty-five donations ~

The closure statement contains one sentence that explains the whole thing better than the funding paragraphs around it: "Despite appeals for support, just 85 of our 5.6 million users in 2018 made a donation." Eighty-five. The site had a donate ribbon up and twenty years of goodwill behind it from the natural history world. On five and a half million people that worked out at fifteen ten-thousandths of a percent.

That number is the argument against the free reference web made in the plainest possible form. Wildscreen had built exactly the thing everyone says they want, an ad-free non-commercial archive run by a charity with no shareholder to answer to, and the people who used it were not the people who paid for it. Nothing about the 85 was unusual. It is roughly what every free site discovers when it finally asks.

~ where the collection went ~

For years before the end Wildscreen tried to hand custodianship to another environmental charity or institution and could not. Legal problems and the cost of the transfer itself defeated every attempt. So the archive was not released and not destroyed. Wildscreen's own wording is that the complete collection of over 100,000 images and videos "is now being stored securely offline in perpetuity for future generations", which means it exists, on disks, belonging to a charity, visible to nobody.

What survives in public is the crawl. The Internet Archive ran a dedicated collection for arkive.org and crawled it between 5 and 7 February 2019, in the last week the site was up. The fact files and the page text came through. The video, which was the entire reason the project existed, largely did not. Wildscreen launched a new UK education platform called Wildscreen ARK in February 2024; it is a fresh start rather than the old archive coming back.

~ the name went to santa fe ~

The domain arkive.org was registered in March 2000 and changed hands in September 2026. It now redirects to a page on life.yippy.com belonging to yippy LLC of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a company founded in 2022, which has put up a post titled "From ARKive to yippy LIFE" and describes itself as the living archive of life on Earth. Wildscreen's own page still says, without linking anywhere, that arkive.org is now closed.

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