The Man Who Ran an Online Alarm Clock for a Decade

It was the early aughts and Tom Churm was an American living in Berlin, working a construction job because he couldn't speak German. That was before he enrolled in a programming course that taught him the skills he needed to design the website that he's maintained, by himself, since 2006: onlineclock.net.

I don't remember when or how I started using the site to wake me up in the mornings, although I imagine my experience was a pretty common one: it was bedtime and my phone was dead, so I googled "online alarm clock." And there it was—the first result. Bare-bones and functional, the site lets you set a time and then it blares an aggravating siren when the clock's big, red numbers reach it. I'm not the only person who found themselves using this oddball webpage with at least some regularity. The site's Facebook page has more than 120,000 likes. Churm uses the page to post memes relating to new features—different skins for the clock, countdowns to holidays—often containing photos depicting things like a rabbit fucking a turtle for Easter or a dog laying a heart-shaped shit on a rug for Valentine's Day. The clock's twitter account boasts upwards of 40,000 followers and posts the dad-est of jokes while its banner depicts "4:20:20" in the clock's familiar red digits.

Keep in mind that Churm has been at this for nearly a decade.

"I'm a one-man army," Churm told me. "I'm the sole owner and programmer and server admin and everything else. This has benefits: I'm able to do whatever I want with the website very quickly. But it also means that I cannot take a vacation or spend an entire weekend without at least caring for my 'baby' a little bit. I always need to have [an] internet connection, just to be able to manage the site."

Churm said he spends nights and weekends working on the site—he's always rolling out new clocks, games for the insomniacs out there, and updating the onlineclock.net blog. Churm has even designed a set of horror-themed, but also alarm clock-themed, digital trading cards. With cards that say things like, "Wake up… you're already dead," and a slogan that encourages you to "collect 'em all, and make your life miserable!" It's clear that Churm possesses a unique brand of offbeat and yet family-friendly humor, underscored by a dash of dogged persistence.

Maybe that's what makes the site and its offshoots so popular—Churm has zeroed in on a demographic of people online that will eat this stuff up. I don't know who they are, exactly, but they exist and the numbers show it. Churm told me that his site net 883,369 unique visits in the last 30 days, which is actually pretty great.

Despite all the work, the site has never been a burden, he told me, because his girlfriend understands that the site is a big part of his life and thus sucks up a lot of his time. He's also currently out of work, he said—he's looking for a gig as an online marketer in Berlin—leaving more time for the site and his other hobbies, like collecting 80s American punk records and, of course, working on onlineclock.net.

With all this time and commitment, would he ever sell the site after all these years?

"In order to sell the site, it would have to be a great offer because I often think, 'What the heck would I do with my time without this website?'" said Churm. "I've been working on it daily for the last nine years and I can easily envision myself working on it in my retirement. It sounds great, being retired and then being able to spend some time each day programming new online clocks as a hobby."

It sounds like onlineclock.net, a strange obsession by a man who loves clocks and code, isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Here's to another decade of terrible memes, dad jokes, and, of course, alarm clocks.

Masters of their Domain is a column that investigates who owns popular or interesting domain names, and what they're doing with them.