From top 3D printing voice to sudden silence — the puzzling story of 3ders.org

I know most of you don’t remember it, but in the first half of the 2010s, the largest and most important portal for 3D printing news was 3ders.org. Really. This oddly constructed site, with its ugly blue color scheme, primitive logo, and a random assortment of photos forming the main banner, was the most important source of information in the global 3D printing industry for years.

The portal was established at the end of 2011 (the first article was published on November 1st) and operated until mid-2019 (the last article was published on April 22nd). Although the word “operated” is somewhat ambiguous in this case. Despite more than five years passing, it still exists. Even though my browsers and antivirus software block it as unsafe, and no images are displayed anymore, it still exists.

Someone is paying for the domain and hosting. Maybe Anja? Maybe someone else? It’s a very strange story…

Rise to glory

3ders.org was founded in the fall of 2011 by a Dutch woman of Chinese descent, Anja van West. At that time, it was the third active and longest-running medium of its kind in the world. For many years, 3ders.org held a dominant position in the 3D printing media market, being the main source for news, product launches, and innovative applications using additive technologies.

A significant part of this was the frequency of published articles. In its heyday (2013–2016), 3ders.org could publish up to 15 articles a day.

Today, this is unimaginable; not enough interesting things happen in the 3D printing industry to generate that much information daily. The articles were mostly news-oriented. It was rare to come across opinion pieces or commentary, unless directly derived from published press releases. Nevertheless, it was enough to generate the highest traffic at the time. I won’t hide that the vast majority of my articles published in 2013–2014 on Centrum Druku 3D were based on information from the Dutch portal.

I owe a lot to 3ders.org at the beginning of my career.

Sudden stall

The portal debuted on November 1, 2011, and fell silent on April 22, 2019. This silence was unprecedented. While the 3D printing industry was experiencing a downturn due to the bursting of the consumer 3D printer bubble, the industrial machine segment was thriving.

Unfortunately, this was not the first such instance with 3ders.org.

A few months earlier, the portal had also gone quiet for about two weeks, and since then, both the number of published articles and their quality had drastically declined. News publications were delayed by 2–3 days compared to others, and their quality dropped.

Not that the word “quality” was ever a defining feature of 3ders.org…

Despite its overwhelming popularity, the portal was not free from controversies and flaws. Over the years, there were “a few” instances of copying articles from other media or basing them entirely on external sources without any citation.

The graphic design of the portal was outdated from the start, reminiscent of the early 2000s. The portal never got a proper logo.

Navigation through its features was inconvenient from the beginning. The product catalogs (3D printers and filaments) stopped being updated after the first four years. Today, they serve as a sort of time capsule.

Anja

Another issue was the founder of the portal, Anja van West. Although I never had the opportunity to meet Anja in person, I had very good email contact with her in the early years of my career and always remember her fondly.

Due to her background, she always had a lot of interesting news from China, which was not as common then as it is today. And since she resided in the Netherlands, which at the time was a kind of “European capital of desktop 3D printing,” we had access to fresh information from the heart of the maker movement. Beyond 3ders.org, Anja doesn’t exist on the internet. Her social media profiles are dead. I assume she isn’t…

People who had the chance to work with or for her always spoke about it very cautiously, hinting in more or less veiled ways that she was a difficult employer.

In the media industry circles, there were (never confirmed by me) rumors that she had rejected very lucrative offers to sell the portal several times. And we — the 3D printing media people — always wondered why, despite its large popularity and traffic, the graphic design of the portal was so hideous…?

Dead silence…

3ders.org still hangs on the internet, although I doubt anyone visits it anymore. Someone is still paying for it — the domain and hosting. This portal could have been worth a lot of money back in the mid-2010s. A very interesting and profitable thing could have been made from 3ders.org at that time. The domain is paid for until September 2025. We’ll see what happens after that date…?