Apberget

» see apberget.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Seven kronor bought a picture of a ski slope. Fifteen bought a sports car. You did not get the car and you did not get the slope. You got a small image attached to another member's profile, and everyone involved understood that what was being purchased was attention from a specific person.

Apberget opened in the autumn of 2003, built in Umeå by three friends who had grown up together. It took Umeå and Skellefteå first and then spread down through the rest of Sweden, Stockholm included. It was aimed at teenagers and it worked the way a small town works: this was where you flirted, and where a rumor took about an hour to reach everybody who mattered.

The money came from advertising and from those member fees, charged through the home or mobile phone bill, which in 2005 was the only payment rail a fourteen year old had access to. Sweden's youth web already had Lunarstorm and Playahead running at national scale. Apberget's answer was regional depth plus a store, and for a while the store was the part that printed money. In February 2007 Västerbottens-Kuriren, the local newspaper group, paid ten million kronor for 51 percent of the company.

~ the dossier ~

~ the program ~

In May 2007, three months after the newspaper bought in, SVT's Uppdrag granskning aired a segment called Vänskap till salu, friendship for sale. It featured two eleven year olds who had bought and sent icons on Apberget to the tune of nearly ten thousand kronor, charged to a family phone account that nobody had thought to check until it arrived.

Apberget agreed to pay money back to a family that had been hit hardest. That was 2007, four years before anyone was writing thinkpieces about free-to-play whales, and the mechanics on trial were the ones every mobile game would ship by 2012. Cheap virtual goods in front of an audience that can see who sent what, bought with a payment method that does not feel like money until the bill comes.

~ what actually closed it ~

The Consumer Agency ruled that Apberget had to end payment services directed at minors, which removed the revenue line the site had been built on. By then the traffic was going anyway. Logins and member counts had been falling sharply for years, and the company had posted losses three years running, on turnover of three million kronor against an 800,000 kronor loss in 2009.

Västerbottens-Kuriren announced the closure through its chief executive, Sture Bergman. Members got word on 1 June 2011 and were given a month to save their photos. The site shut at the end of 30 June, all user images and files were destroyed after that, and a notice explaining what had happened was left on the server until 31 December 2011. Swedish Wikipedia records the death as 1 July, one day later than the owner's own announcement, which is the sort of gap you get when a site closes at midnight.

~ the domain now ~

apberget.se still resolves. It 301s to vk.se, the newspaper that bought the company and then buried it. Of all the ways a dead teen community can end up, pointing at the regional daily that owns its corpse is an unusually honest one.

Apberget was for fourteen year olds in Västerbotten trying to get the attention of a particular fifteen year old in Västerbotten. In 2003 I was nineteen and in Turkey, outside the age band and off the map, and no amount of reading turns that into something I can claim to have felt.

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