5by5

» see 5by5.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 25 January 2022 the 5by5 homepage was still a working podcast network. Thirteen shows ran down the sidebar, a line near the bottom announced that bandwidth for January was sponsored by CacheFly, and the whole page came to a little over seven kilobytes. Seven days later the same address served 1,099 bytes. The word 5by5, one sentence saying it had made podcasts for geeks and developers since 2009, and a copyright notice that stopped at 2022.

Dan Benjamin had built the thing out of his own show feed. The network's own masthead dated itself to 2009 while Wikipedia puts the founding at 2010, and some profiles reach back to 2008. That spread is what happens when a business starts as one person publishing audio and only later decides it is a company. What it became is not in dispute. For a stretch of the early 2010s, if you worked in software and listened to anything, you listened to something hosted at 5by5.tv.

The roster at the end was a quieter one than the network is remembered for. Back to Work had been running with Merlin Mann since 2011 and DLC covered games, with the rest split between Rails and the business of working. The names that made the network's reputation had left years earlier. John Gruber took The Talk Show elsewhere in 2012, and John Siracusa's Hypercritical had already finished its run.

This is a network that assumed a commute. Its shows ran an hour or two of two Americans talking, pulled down over home broadband and listened to behind a steering wheel. In 2012 my data allowance was measured in hundreds of megabytes and my ride to work was a dolmuş. I read Daring Fireball every week for years. The podcast with the same man's name on it never once finished downloading, and nobody at my desk was downloading it either.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ thirteen shows ~

The last live capture is worth reading as an inventory. Alongside the thirteen current shows the page still advertised two iOS apps, a Mac app, a master RSS feed, a separate video feed, a newsletter called The Frequency, a schedule, a donate link and a T-shirt store. It was a whole broadcaster's worth of infrastructure built for a roster that had thinned out. Sponsor logos for CacheFly and Linode still sat at the bottom of the page in January 2022.

~ the week the page went flat ~

There was no shutdown post. No farewell episode on the master feed, no countdown of any kind. The homepage was a network on 25 January and a copyright line on 1 February, and the archive has served that copyright line continuously ever since, through to this month. Whatever decision got made was made privately and executed with a file replacement.

Somebody noticed on 15 February, two weeks later, and posted a tweet titled "The 5by5 Podcast Network Is No More". It reached Hacker News the same day and got four points and one comment. The comment said the network had hosted many of the first tech podcasts the commenter ever listened to, and that it was still the first network he was personally familiar with, even though the surviving shows had migrated away years before. That is the entire public record of the end.

~ the shows kept their feeds ~

The flat page still carries links, and that is the part worth reading closely. It points at six show sites, and every one of them is a fireside.fm address. Fireside is a podcast hosting and analytics company, and Dan Benjamin founded it. So the network did not collapse under its shows. Its founder had built the platform underneath podcasting, and at some point in that week he stopped running a network on top of his own product and let the shows stand as independent feeds.

They kept going for a while on their own. Back to Work published its final episode in April 2024, more than two years after the network that launched it stopped existing. Fireside itself was acquired in 2024. In 2025 the company 5by5 Productions turned up in Texas business records as inactive. The paperwork was catching up with a homepage that had told the truth three years earlier.

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