Education
Bates graduated from Holland Christian High School in 1994 and received a Bachelor"s degree in History from Hope College in 1998.
Bates graduated from Holland Christian High School in 1994 and received a Bachelor"s degree in History from Hope College in 1998.
Malda and Bates created in 1997, while undergraduates at Hope College. In 1999 they sold the site to Andover.net, which was acquired by Virginia Linux Systems in 2000 (which became SourceForge, Incorporated in 2007, then Geeknet, Incorporated in 2009). Bates served as Director of Media Operations for Geeknet from May 2001 through July 2004, when he became Vice President of Editorial Operations and Executive Editor of In February 2008 he became Geeknet"s Vice President of Platform and headed the core engineering and product teams for, freshmeat, and SourceForge.
In August 2011, Bates joined Google.
Bates founded in July 1997 under the original name "chips and dips", later in September of 1997 the site became what it is known as today. is a technology-related news website, it features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics. In 2012, had around 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received over 5300 comments per day.
Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the "effect".