Areamobile.de

» see areamobile.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I never read Areamobile. It was in German and I am not. The shape of it I know exactly, though: a site that reviewed handsets, with a forum bolted onto the side where people argued about the handsets. In Turkey that meant donanimhaber and frmtr, where I spent most of the 2000s maintaining a forum signature made out of my own hardware list. Every country had one of these. Germany's lasted nineteen years.

Four people started Areamobile.de in 2002: Dyrk Draenkow, Stefan Adolf, Bastian Albert, Frank Rennebarth. IQ-Studio Media Verlag published it for the first four years. In 2006 the founders moved it into a company of their own called AreaMobile AG. That company bought other sites and renamed itself AreaDigital AG in May 2008, with something like fifty staff in Berlin-Mitte. That is a publishing house, not a hobby.

André Kolbinger was the principal shareholder and chairman of the board until 1 July 2016, when Computec Media took the site over. Computec is a Fürth publisher whose other titles are games and hardware magazines, which means it knew precisely what a traffic-funded enthusiast site costs to run and what one brings in.

~ the case file ~

~ 1.4 million a month ~

The numbers were never the problem, or at least not on the surface. Areamobile.de pulled 1.4 million visits a month at its height, with a net reach of 480,000 unique users, which put it inside the top 500 websites in Germany. Google carried just under 185,000 of its pages in the index.

For a single-subject site about phones, in one language, that is a genuinely large audience. It is also exactly the size of audience that display advertising stopped being able to support somewhere between 2015 and 2020, once the ad money consolidated into two companies and the phone coverage itself moved onto YouTube.

~ handykult ~

The forum came in under its own name. Handykult.de was folded into the main site during a redesign in September 2009, and after that the comments under an article and the threads in the forum were the same conversation. This is the part that made these sites durable: a review gets read once, but a forum thread about whether the battery is actually any good runs for three years and brings the same people back every week.

It is also the part that makes them expensive. A forum needs moderation and a database that keeps growing, and neither of those gets cheaper as the traffic flattens out. When the site went dark, handykult.de went with it.

~ the last day of the year ~

The announcement came in December 2021, weeks ahead of the end. Management put it in one line: the operation of the portal for news and information about smartphones would be discontinued at the end of the year for economic reasons. No sale, no merge into a sibling title. Nothing about an archive. It ran to 31 December 2021 and stopped.

Choosing the last day of the calendar year is an accountant's decision rather than an editor's, and it tells you which side of the building made the call.

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