But back in 2006, if you’d have told me I’d still be doing it in 15 years, I’d have thought you were insane. There’s no singular thing I could point to going, “Oh no, we just don’t want to deal with that.” There was nothing like that. Was there any one thing that made you say, “LiveLeak has run its course”? And now we pretty much reached the same decision. And after 15 years, we kind of decided there wasn’t much left in the well.Ī few of us did the same thing back in the day with Ogrish.
And you know, with a site like LiveLeak, it’s not just a business decision.
It’s the internet - you’re going to get the strange ones as well. I take it as a compliment that people cared, that people found value in the site. I get all sorts of things thrown at me online. The latest one is the belief that we were paid off by the Israelis to close before this current situation. I know it’s far more exciting to think we were closed down or paid off or whatever else. I thought we were pretty straightforward in the statement everything was actually in there. It all happened very suddenly, and you were pretty vague about the reasons, so I’m just going to cut right to the chase and ask. You announced earlier this month that LiveLeak was ending after nearly 15 years. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Naturally, we wanted to know more, so Input called up Hewitt to discuss the decision to shutter LiveLeak - and what he’s learned about the dark side of humanity over the past decade and a half. Later, on his YouTube channel Trigger Warning, Hewitt said his team “just didn’t have it in us to carry on fighting,” but didn’t get into specifics.
(LiveLeak has often been described as U.K.-based, but its servers were located in the U.S.) He was the one to break the news of LiveLeak’s demise via a blog post, saying it “felt LiveLeak had achieved all that it could and it was time for us to try something new and exciting.” That something is a new video-sharing and remixing site called ItemFix that bans “excessive violence or gory content.” Hewitt is 48 and lives with his family in the suburbs of Manchester, U.K. “It amuses me to no end, and I love to see it.” “The fact that it became some kind of meme, that tickles me so much,” LiveLeak cofounder Hayden Hewitt, the public face of what was an otherwise anonymously run enterprise, tells Input.
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