# Ancient Web: Watching Grass Grow Gave the Internet a Lawn to Stare At Since 2005, a webcam trained on one Colorado front lawn has become a running joke, an equipment laboratory, and a surprisingly lively community archive. 2026-10-16 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Watching Grass Grow Gave the Internet a Lawn to Stare At](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). Someone once decided that watching grass grow deserved its own live Internet broadcast. Then the camera stayed on for two decades. [Visit Watching Grass Grow](https://www.watching-grass-grow.com/). The site's creator says the domain was registered on May 28, 2005 and went live shortly afterward. The original camera was a D-Link DCS-6620G looking out of a bedroom window at a suburban Colorado lawn. The frame contained grass, passing cars, an occasional pedestrian, and whatever weather came through. That was more or less the entire program. Yet the deliberately uneventful premise acquired an audience. The website claims millions of visitors over its lifetime, and a [2017 Southwest Airlines magazine feature](https://www.watching-grass-grow.com/2017_southwest-airlines-magazine/) gave the lawn nine pages. Those figures and publicity links come from the site's own account, but its surviving comment archive independently demonstrates that real visitors were returning for the spectacle of very little happening. ## What did viewers talk about? The lawn The [2006 grass blog](https://www.watching-grass-grow.com/blog/2006.html) preserves 1,389 entries and replies. Visitors celebrate a FedEx truck, a jogger, the arrival of snow, and the possibility of seeing a neighbor. The creator, posting as Mr. Grass, answers questions and supplies the occasional photograph. At one point a commenter worries that too many people are watching the Christmas lights instead. This is a useful artifact of early webcam culture: before streaming became synonymous with personality-led entertainment, simply connecting a camera to the Internet was a novelty. The interaction happened around the feed rather than inside it. The [equipment history](https://www.watching-grass-grow.com/IP-Camera-test-review/) is unexpectedly detailed. A Vivotek dome replaced the D-Link in 2011; 2018 brought side-by-side comparisons of newer cameras and the move toward HD, with shutter speeds, saturation settings, and nighttime images carefully described. Another camera arrived in 2023. Naturally, the real technical challenge was getting a better view of individual blades of grass. The homepage still presents a live feed and links to yearly videos and old blog entries. Whether the feed plays in a particular browser depends on its scripts and streaming setup. There is no hidden punchline. The joke is that somebody made an elaborate website about waiting for almost nothing—and kept maintaining it. [Watch the lawn and explore its camera history](https://www.watching-grass-grow.com/). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#internetculture](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/internetculture/), [#webhistory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/webhistory/), [#humor](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/humor/), [#webcams](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/webcams/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-watching-grass-grow-finally-gave-the-web-a-lawn-to-stare-at/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-17T03:05:20+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:05:00.446930+00:00 Description: Watching Grass Grow preserves a live webcam, a detailed camera-upgrade record, and twenty years of reader responses to an aggressively uneventful broadcast.