Sam “Bring Back Bullying” Biddle was one of the key minions of Gawker that #GamerGate went after for attempting to incite hate toward nerd culture and gaming culture. According to Gawker owner Nick Denton, Biddle and company who targeted #GamerGate became the target of Operation Disrespectful Nod, which resulted in the company losing anywhere between $1 million and $9 million in advertising. Well, the costs seem to have been adding up over time because Valleywag, the website that was the previous home to Sam Biddle, is now closed.

Kotaku in Action was quick to point out that the website had shutdown on January 1st, 2016. The announcement was made by Gawker’s John Cook, who – keeping in tradition with Gawker’s aim to provide short and usually meaningless posts – made a succinct update on Valleywag, writing…

“Here lies Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip and news site launched in 2006 by Gawker Media and decommissioned in 2015. Its editors and writers over the years included Nick Douglas, Nick Denton, Owen Thomas, Ryan Tate, Nitasha Tiku, and Sam Biddle. The site’s archives are maintained here, but no new posts will be published at this page.”

It probably took Sam Biddle longer to formulate the tweet that may have cost them the site than it did for John Cook to write the entry noting that the site is no more.

For those of you not in the know, Sam Biddle’s “Bring Back Bullying” tweet that occurred during the height of #GamerGate happenings resulted in lots of donations to charity by the colloquially named “Pro-GG” people and eventually led to Sam Biddle being moved from Valleywag to another position within Gawker. This happened while Gawker began restructuring after Operation Disrespectful nod – a campaign formulated by #GamerGate – targeted Gawker’s known advertisers like BMW, Dyson and Mercedes, but also went after Gawker’s native advertisers, which is where they made most of their money through vendors like StackSocial.

A lot of these campaigns to target advertisers was spearheaded by gamers who organized on 8chan, Reddit and Twitter following some keen advice from a former Games Journo Pro member who explained how to pull advertising from a large outlet.

Coupling those losses with a string of high-profile incidents that further damaged the Gawker brand — including outing the Conde Naste CFO and the $100 million lawsuit from Hulk Hogan — have done nothing but spiral Gawker into a mind-share and financial tailspin.

An article by Pando Daily back in June of 2015 highlighted how Valleywag has been consistently losing leverage from the Biddle incident all the way through 2015. Seeing the site close after all of what transpired over the past year and a half is actually not that surprising.

What a way to kick off 2016, eh?