Azbuz

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

~ the obit ~

Azbuz published an age breakdown of its own users in 2009, which settles the question of whether i belonged there without my having to guess. Forty three percent of the people running azbuz pages were twelve to seventeen. Another thirty four percent were eighteen to twenty five. i was twenty five that year and finishing an engineering degree, sitting at the far edge of the second bucket and a decade past the age that made the place work.

It opened in may 2006, a joint effort between Doğan Online, the internet arm of the biggest media group in the country, and a development shop called Over Team. The offer was simple enough to fit under the logo, and it did: kendi sitenizin kâhyası olun, be the steward of your own site. Sign up, get your-name.azbuz.com, put whatever you want on it.

What you got was more than a blog. There was a photo service from may 2007 with weekly competitions attached, an RSS feed added in 2008, video, and a forum section that came with every page so your visitors had somewhere to argue. Over Team sold its shares to the Doğan Group in 2008, by which point the site was pulling 1.1 million unique visitors a month.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the numbers ~

On 19 february 2009 azbuz crossed a million hosted sites and blogs, fifty one percent up on the year before. The rest of the count that came with it is worth writing down: 3,015,850 articles, 7,203,692 photographs, 2,546,859 forum posts and comments, 358,227 videos. All of that generated by people who mostly had not finished school.

The press release built its headline on a Netcraft figure. There were roughly 215 million websites in the world that february, and a million of them were azbuz pages. The framing is marketing but the arithmetic is real, and it tells you something about how the turkish web was shaped in 2009. A media conglomerate handed out subdomains and one in every couple of hundred sites on earth was somebody's page on it.

~ who it was actually for ~

Eighty percent of the page owners were male. Thirty nine percent had finished high school and thirty one percent had gone no further than primary education, which is another way of saying most of them were still in school when they signed up. The largest category was entertainment and hobbies with 198,884 sites, and technology and gaming came third with 133,576.

The texture follows from that. Azbuz ran a World of Warcraft fan site competition in january 2007. The photo contests were weekly. This was not a publishing platform in the sense the word later acquired, with the drafts and the audience metrics and the newsletter. It was a place to have a page, which for a fifteen year old in 2008 was the entire point, and the forum on the bottom of every page meant you could hold court on your own territory.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shutdown came in 2012 and there is no announcement to quote, no farewell post, no date anyone recorded more precisely than the year. Doğan had larger problems by then and a blog platform full of teenagers was not among the ones it discussed publicly.

Hosting on somebody else's subdomain is a bet that the somebody else stays interested. When azbuz.com stopped, every your-name.azbuz.com stopped with it, because they were never separate things. The domain today serves a lander for a broker who would like to sell it to you. A million pages of turkish adolescence, and the address they lived at is now a price.

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