It's amazing how coldbloodily the Sadam-Houssein look-a-like finishes the job by shooting the victims point blank." ~Evil Knevil "Well Sicko's the first clip I want to share with you is a smuggled footage out of Irak of a public execution. Uploads were teased with sensational, sloppily composed captions: While you might see a headline like "Man's Genitals Attacked by Flesh-Eating Bug," you may also come across a video of 9/11 World Trade Center jumpers or an execution carried out by Mexican drug cartels. In addition to hosting snuff content meant to thrill visitors in search of real-life horror, Ogrish developed a reputation for hosting gruesome footage of war and terrorism. Newly enabled by greater network bandwidth, Ogrish's webmaster, known as "Evil Knevil," was able to treat site visitors to video content of unknown origin that generated gasps and whispers in dorm rooms across the globe. Ogrish differentiated itself by hosting gruesome video footage. Supported by often-violent porn ads, the site grew a dedicated fanbase. Just 12 years ago, if you'd visited the front page of the site, then located at, you would have been confronted with graphic content and such subject headers as "Genital Mutilation." When Ogrish launched in the early aughts, it was one of several "shock sites" (such as Rotten, Stileproject, et al.) that hosted images of mutilated corpses, car accidents, burn victims, genetic malformations and other grotesqueries. Today LiveLeak's moderators prune videos that demonstrate "glorification of graphic violence." They've come a long way from their grisly origins. Despite its lack of advertising and its disinterest in both media-centric New York and the tech hub of Silicon Valley, LiveLeak boasts around 23 million unique views a month, a huge majority of which come from the U.S.Īnd while it began as a site that would show anything (much of it branded "mature content"), LiveLeak recently drew the line at hosting the execution videos of the Islamic State, the group more commonly known as ISIS. And yet their brainchild,, has grown over the past eight years into one of the most far-reaching media companies in the world, and one of the 500 most visited sites on the Internet. Its founders aren't journalists by trade and by all accounts have no business running a news site. They've never once met in person and they never will. It doesn't have interns, and none of its employees draw a living wage for their contributions. One of the world's most important media organizations doesn't have an office.