... as I was saying, a strange twist of fate saw us enter ReefTracks.org into the Webbys. You read a lot of gripe about awards outfits like the Webbys. Paid en

... as I was saying, a strange twist of fate saw us enter ReefTracks.org into the Webbys. You read a lot of gripe about awards outfits like the Webbys. Paid entries, category cash-grab, tilted towards the big end of town. It’s the same in every industry. I’m not sure exactly how much we paid to enter two categories in this year’s awards, but it was north of AU$1000 with the exchange rate. To put that in perspective, it’s around 0.3% of our annual operating budget as a charity [4]. And was it worth it? Well, we lucked out and picked up a nomination for ‘Best Science Website’. Which dropped us in the green room alongside @NatGeo (23 million followers) and @nasa (infinity) … with a site built out of cereal boxes and borrowed time, in a council-donated office in Cairns (a small reef town in the middle of nowhere), Australia. Our bandwidth is way up (Cloudflare reports over 18GB served in the last 24 hours), people are engaging more than ever with our educational (snore) social channels [5], and it’s already opening doors we thought were walls. And all thanks to a highly-predictable, sure-loss, paid-for-the-privilege, semi-public poll (ahem). Most importantly it has the potential to put an international spotlight on the Reef and its inhabitants at a critical time in their history. So if you’d like to know how Fletcher spends his afternoons (as a 4m, 500kg tiger shark), or investigate the rank and file of a mysterious whale shark congregation in the northern GBR then please take a look. If you want to back us for the win (ha!) please do - there’s a link below [6]. Or if you have any suggestions, requests or massive criticisms please let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading. [4] https://www.acnc.gov.au/charity/90a518adbdc2023bf192f43b6ca80eb7 [5] https://twitter.com/citizensGBR [6] https://reeftracks.org/webbys