Affinity Labs

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

~ the obit ~

The bet was that general-purpose social networking would never serve a firefighter properly. In 2006 that was a sharp read. Facebook had only just opened past the universities, and LinkedIn was a rolodex with no rooms in it. Affinity Labs went after the rooms: a separate site per occupation, each with its own forums and its own job listings, so that the people inside it were talking to colleagues rather than to the general public.

Christopher Michel started it in San Francisco, which matters because he had already done this once. He built Military.com and sold it to Monster Worldwide in 2004 for about forty million dollars. Affinity Labs was the same insight, industrialized: Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures put money in during 2006 and the company shipped vertical after vertical.

The list is a tour of American working life. PoliceLink for law enforcement, FireLink for firefighters, NursingLink and AllHealthCare for medicine, TheApple for teachers, AdminSecret for administrative assistants, SalesHQ for sales, InsideTech for IT, GovCentral for public service, ArtBistro for designers, Excelle for professional women. Then the European wing: HMForces.co.uk for the British armed forces, ProNurse, and WerPflegtWen in German. Over a million registered members by January 2008, with PoliceLink alone drawing 717,000 unique visitors a month.

That January, Monster bought the company for sixty-one million dollars. It was the second time Michel had sold to Monster in four years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why a job board wanted it ~

Monster was not buying communities for their own sake. A job board's problem is that nobody visits one until they want to leave their job, which makes the audience both enormous and almost entirely absent. An occupational social network fixes that: a nurse who posts on NursingLink every week is a nurse whose next job search happens on your property. Monster kept buying to fill the same hole, and in 2008 it added Armees.com, a French military site, and filed it into the Affinity Labs vertical alongside HMForces.

Harvard Business School wrote the company up as a teaching case about valuing customer growth. The underlying asset was a set of websites where cops argued with each other about shift patterns.

~ the london closure ~

The European operation died first and for a reason that has nothing to do with social networking. From 2010 a retired Navy admiral, Terry McCreary, ran Monster's military business with a product manager in London reporting across the Atlantic. The UK Ministry of Defence then put its recruiting out to tender as the Recruiting Partnering Project, Monster bid and lost, and Capita signed a contract worth forty-four million pounds over ten years. The European arm was closed down in 2012, HMForces included, despite it being the most successful site in that group. A recession was blamed as well, but the lost tender is what dates the closure.

~ how the brand actually ended ~

No shutdown notice exists, so the domain has to say it. affinitylabs.com served a two-page brochure for years: a logo, a cartoon robot, a paragraph noting the Monster acquisition, and a table of links to every vertical. It was still serving that page on 29 September 2017. By 29 March 2018 the address was a permanent redirect to monster.com/communities, and it stayed a redirect for years afterward before going dark completely.

Today affinitylabs.com resolves to nothing, and so do policelink.com and nursinglink.com. Monster itself was bought by Randstad in 2016 and the content was folded into the Monster brand by 2021. None of those forums is served anywhere today, under any address.

~ the turkish version of this never got funded ~

Occupational communities existed here too, they just were not companies. The Turkish internet of 2006 put its professional talk on forums, and the forums were built around hobbies and hardware rather than around jobs. I was on donanimhaber and frmtr in those years, where the signature block under your posts was a list of your own components and your standing in a thread was earned over years. Nobody raised venture money to build a separate site for Turkish nurses, and the nurses were already somewhere else. Affinity Labs is the American answer to the same need, with a cap table attached and an acquirer waiting.

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