Arto

» see arto.dk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Arto started on 3 February 1998 as a website of jokes, put up by a Dane named Morten Borg. It became, over about six years, the place where Danish children and teenagers between roughly ten and eighteen conducted their entire social lives. Danish television called it the first major social network in Denmark that was not a dating service, which is a specific and useful description: before Arto, being on a Danish site with a profile and a photo meant you were looking for someone.

The peak was 2007 and 2008. Over 800,000 active profiles in a country of five and a half million. A hundred million page views a month. More than eighty thousand people logged in at the same moment, on a Tuesday evening, in Danish. For a period Arto was simply the biggest website in Denmark, ahead of the newspapers and the broadcaster.

Ownership settled into an arrangement where Borg kept 49 percent and Freeway ApS, the company behind dating.dk and a stack of other Danish portals, held the majority. That is a normal shape for a site that grows past its founder. It also meant that when the numbers stopped working, the decision was going to be made by people who ran a portfolio rather than by the person who had built the thing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what an evening on arto looked like ~

A profile and a photo gallery, plus a guestbook that other people wrote in publicly, which was the load-bearing feature and the one everybody remembers. Forums sorted by subject, film and music among them. User-created clubs with quiz functions attached. A chat that Arto closed in May 2008, reopened later that year under pressure, and eventually shut for good. There was even a Windows desktop notifier written in Delphi, which tells you what kind of machine the average Danish teenager was sitting at.

Arto also ran identity verification unusually early, with photo confirmation and video checks meant to guarantee that the fourteen-year-old you were talking to was fourteen. Sites did not generally do that in 2005.

~ the headlines ~

For most of its second decade Arto was in the Danish press for two reasons, and neither was the traffic. One was bullying, which on a site built around a public guestbook attached to a child's photograph was structurally easy to do and hard to undo. The other was adults using the site to reach minors. The coverage was relentless enough that "Arto" acquired a connotation in Danish media that had nothing to do with what most of its users were actually doing on it, which was arguing about music.

Advertisers read the same newspapers. A site with 800,000 teenage profiles should have been a straightforward media business, and by the early 2010s it was not, because the brands that wanted Danish teenagers did not want to be next to the coverage. Facebook was meanwhile taking the users themselves, first the older ones and then everybody.

~ 1 june 2016 ~

The closure was announced on 16 April 2016 and executed on 1 June. Morten Wagner of Freeway gave the only reason there was, which is that the site had stopped being a profitable business. DR ran interviews with people in their late twenties who had met partners and found their way into an education through Arto, which is the standard genre for these things and was in this case fairly earned.

Denmark's version of this decade did not reach me at all, and I would not claim otherwise: I was at university in Turkey through most of Arto's peak, and the Turkish arrangement was different in a way worth stating. We did not have one dominant local social site holding a generation. We had MSN Messenger for the people you already knew and Hi5 sitting on top of it for the people you sort of knew, split across two products that neither belonged to us nor knew we existed. Denmark got a single Danish-language website that was genuinely theirs for eighteen years, and then watched it close. Both endings are losses, but only one of them had a date on it.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »