I forget if heartbleed was the first one to a have a homepage or the first one to have a catchy name, but it was to help with the public relations angle of convincing CIOs or their equivalents in an organization to take the problem seriously AFAIK. Someone else here can probably answer it better.

Ever reported a security vulnerability to a company and had it severely downplayed before?

It kind of makes sense for all the fundamental hardware vulnerabilities.

For most software vulnerabilities, the main takeaway message for the layperson is "yesterday's release of TheThing fixes some bad stuff. Don't use old versions, update to the new release" and the details matter only for the specialists.

For attacks like Rowhammer or Meltdown or Spectre or this one, however, there's lots of information that's still going to be relevant years after the publication - many people will have vulnerable hardware that will stay vulnerable, and you can still buy vulnerable hardware and so need to evaluate if your situation requires specific hardware choices to avoid these vulnerabilities, etc. So a long-term informative website is pretty much necessary.

I imagine these researchers are proud of their findings and want to promote their work and their own personal brands. Name recognition is a big part of academia. You'll notice a "People" section immediately following the description of the vulnerability.

Came here to ask the same.

Then thought about it and was expecting to see a comment saying “it’s so that normal people understand the vulnerabilities.”

And then I realized it’s probably also because of a desire to be seen. (It seems all participants are from academia?)

I personally find much easier to fully understand the implications of a security vulnerability that can affect me and my side projects. I'm a full time front-end dev and I do not follow security news explicitly. If severe vulnerabilities have dedicated home pages then it's easier to spread awareness and more people end up sharing the same resource thus keeping people updated easily

This one's a novel iteration of Rowhammer, and people find Rowhammer interesting.