10000 Flies

» see 10000flies.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This one is in German and about German media, so it never had any reason to reach me, and the only way I found it was through a dead-site list. It is here because of what it did rather than where it did it. There is no English-language equivalent that survived, and there was never a Turkish one at all.

Jens Schröder launched 10000 Flies on 23 January 2013 through a Düsseldorf company called active value GmbH. The service crawled thousands of German-language news sources and measured how hard each article was being passed around on the social platforms of the day. It counted shares and comments on Twitter and Facebook alongside blog links, then combined those signals into one score and published the top fifty at nine o'clock each morning.

The name reads as a joke about the crowd. German has a saying that runs ten thousand flies cannot be wrong, and the second half of it is about what flies choose to eat. Whether or not that was the intent, it is a strange thing to call a popularity chart, and they published the chart anyway, every day, for over twelve years.

~ the record ~

~ what a country reads before lunch ~

The useful thing about a daily national share chart is not the top entry. It is the shape of the list. You could open 10000 Flies on any morning between 2013 and 2025 and see, in fifty rows, which outlets were actually being circulated as opposed to which ones claimed circulation, and how far a story from a regional paper could travel when it hit something real.

Der Spiegel and Die Zeit cited it, and so did taz. The Wall Street Journal reached for it when it needed a number for what Germans were sharing. A one-man data project became the thing large newsrooms pointed at, which happens more often than newsrooms like to admit, and it happened because nobody else was doing the work.

~ the measurement problem it outlived ~

A tool like this depends entirely on the platforms handing out numbers. Facebook throttled its share counts and Google+ closed in 2019. Then Twitter's API went from free to expensive across 2023, which is where most of the remaining social-measurement tools stopped. Every aggregator of this type in the English-speaking web died somewhere in that sequence, most of them years before 2025.

10000 Flies kept publishing through all of it. Whatever the last version of the score was measuring, it was not the same thing the 2013 version measured, which is the quiet problem with any long-running index and the reason the last one standing tends to stand alone.

~ folding the wings ~

The Internet Archive brackets it tightly. On 8 September 2025 the front page was still 18.6 KB of ranked links. By 04:25 UTC on 25 September the whole site had collapsed to a 1.7 KB page with a single paragraph on it, and that page is still what the domain serves today.

It reads: dear users, after more than ten years we say goodbye, 10000flies.de is folding its wings. Thank you all for your energy and for the buzzing of the last decade. Then a line about it being time for new flight paths, and an email address in case anyone gets nostalgic. No acquisition and no insolvency notice. Twelve and a half years of daily publishing, closed with a pun about bugs.

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