1stUp.com

» see 1stup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Turkish dial-up in 1998 was metered. You paid the ISP and then you paid the phone company for every minute the modem held the line, and the second number was the one that mattered, which is why entire households developed strong opinions about how long you had been online. Reading about Americans getting permanent internet access for nothing, in exchange for looking at a banner, did not compute from that side of the world.

1stUp.com launched in 1998 out of San Francisco. The product was a dialer you installed plus a small window that parked itself on your screen and served advertisements for as long as you stayed connected. That window was the price, the same arrangement NetZero and Juno were running.

CMGI bought the company in September 1999. CMGI was the internet incubator of that moment, a Massachusetts holding company that owned AltaVista among a long list of others, run by David Wetherell, and at its peak in early 2000 the market valued it above most of the businesses it actually held.

The AltaVista connection was the growth engine. AltaVista offered free internet access to its users and 1stUp carried the traffic underneath it, which took subscriber numbers to somewhere around three million. For about a year that looked like a real business.

~ the record ~

~ how free was supposed to work ~

The arithmetic was that a dial-up subscriber cost a few dollars a month in modem banks and bandwidth, and that a captive advertising frame sitting in front of that subscriber for twenty hours a month would sell for more than that. In 1999 it very nearly did. Free ISPs collectively held 14.85 million active American subscribers in the last quarter of 2000, which is not a niche by any measure.

The trouble was that the users who cost money grew faster than the users who could be sold. Heavy users stayed connected for hours and generated almost no additional revenue past the first few impressions, and a free ISP had no mechanism for getting rid of them, because getting rid of users was the one thing the pitch forbade.

~ november 2000 ~

On 13 November 2000 CMGI announced it was closing 1stUp.com in San Francisco and iCast in Woburn, Massachusetts, and would look for buyers for both. Wetherell framed it as focusing on the segments where the company could reach profitability, which was the standard sentence that year. If no buyer turned up, the deadline for shutting 1stUp down was the end of January 2001.

No buyer turned up. The service stopped working in December, and the last capture of the site in the Internet Archive is dated 2 December 2000, which is about as precise as this class of death gets in the record.

~ the shakeout ~

1stUp was one of a set, and the set went down together. AltaVista closed its own free access product in the same window. Freei withdrew its IPO on 2 October 2000 and filed for bankruptcy a week later. Spinway, which powered free access for Kmart's BlueLight.com, collapsed and took its partners' services down with it. NetZero and Juno survived by merging in 2001 and converting into a cheap paid ISP, which is a different business wearing an old name.

Free internet access did not end there, exactly. What ended was the belief that advertising alone could pay for infrastructure at consumer scale with no subscription underneath it. That belief has come back roughly once a decade since, and it has still never worked in the connectivity layer.

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