How a teenage “internet whizz” helped create the website Shell tried — and failed — to silence for three decades.
A Phantom Web Whizz Became Shell’s Digital Nemesis
In the mid-1990s, when the Internet still seemed like a passing fad and oil companies still lectured the world about “responsible energy,” a quiet digital operator answered a newspaper advertisement from John Donovan, the former Shell promotions partner turned corporate adversary.
The ad sought an “Internet whizz.”
What Shell got was something far worse—a digital insurgency that would haunt its reputation for decades.
By 1998, even the Evening Standard took notice: a small website run from Colchester had become a major reputational threat to one of the world’s largest corporations. That website—eventually mirrored as RoyalDutchShellPLC.com and ShellNews.net—would become Shell’s digital nemesis, archiving leaks, lawsuits, and internal documents that chronicled the oil giant’s ethical, environmental, and legal missteps.
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By John Donovan
EBOOK TITLE: “SIR HENRI DETERDING AND THE NAZI HISTORY OF ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
EBOOK TITLE: “JOHN DONOVAN, SHELL’S NIGHTMARE: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE UNSCRUPULOUS OIL GIANT ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
EBOOK TITLE: “TOXIC FACTS ABOUT SHELL REMOVED FROM WIKIPEDIA: HOW SHELL BECAME THE MOST HATED BRAND IN THE WORLD” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
