alaMaula

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

~ the goodbye ~

Classified ads are the most stubbornly local thing on the internet. Nobody in Cordoba wants to buy a used refrigerator from Sao Paulo, so whoever owns the listings in a city owns them until somebody else owns them, and no amount of foreign capital shortens that. alaMaula was built on exactly that insight at the end of 2009 by Guillermo and Jorge de Bernardo, working with Roque Peralta and Diego Noriega, and it was free to post.

It grew fast enough that eBay noticed. In July 2011 the eBay Classifieds Group announced it had bought the company as its first move into Latin America, and the release said the site was already seeing more than five million visits a month. The mascot was a small cartoon detective in a pith helmet holding a magnifying glass, and after the acquisition the logo carried the line Una Compañía de eBay underneath the wordmark. The plan was to take that into the Spanish and Portuguese markets above and around Argentina.

The plan did not survive contact with Mercado Libre, which had been in the same market since 1999 and had payments, shipping and a network that was already there. The founders later pointed at a second thing: the restrictions Argentina placed on moving foreign currency after 2012, which made the country hard to fund out of California. Then in 2018 the activist investor Paul Singer took a stake in eBay and the company began cutting things that were not going to be large. On 4 February 2019 eBay announced the end. New ads stopped on 4 March, every remaining listing expired on 4 April, and that was the site.

Sahibinden has owned this exact category in Turkey since 2000 and is still sitting on it. That is the outcome alaMaula's founders were aiming at, and it is the one thing eBay's money could not buy them. In most countries the classifieds question got settled locally and then stayed settled, which is why a site like this one is legible to me from four continents away without my ever having seen a page of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the offer eBay sat on ~

Three weeks after the closure notice, the original founders sent eBay a formal offer to buy the site back, conditions and all. It was reported in February 2019 with De Bernardo saying the buyer was being evaluated but that eBay seemed to be running out the clock, and that he still believed it would happen. It did not happen. The ads expired on schedule and the company that had paid for the thing let it expire rather than sell it to the people who built it.

By then the numbers being quoted were past tense: more than twenty million visits at the peak, about 2.9 million unique users in the final stretch. In 2013 it had won an Eikon prize for best product launch, which is the kind of award a company collects in the years when the story still looks like it is going somewhere.

~ what is at the address now ~

The domain had a strange middle decade. Wayback captures of alamaula.com from 2024 show it hosting a dropshipping storefront full of shoe racks and makeup brush sets, along with a set of American bank logos sitting in a fingerprinted asset directory.

The name came back anyway. A relaunch under the entrepreneur Matías Gemelli put Argentine classifieds back under the alamaula brand, and today alamaula.com redirects to alamaula.com.ar, which answers with 665 KB of listings titled alamaula Avisos Clasificados Gratis en Argentina. It is a different company wearing a dead brand, which is not the same thing as the brand being alive. The site eBay closed on 4 April 2019 stayed closed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »