BettyConfidential

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

~ the last words ~

BettyConfidential launched in March 2008 out of Palo Alto, built by Deborah Perry Piscione and Shaun Marsh under a company called Desha Productions. The name carried the pitch: Betty for a friend you trust, Confidential for the things women do not say out loud. Underneath sat the slogan it used everywhere, your best friend, only better.

It was aimed at women between 25 and 49, and the founder was specific about who that was not. She described the reader as a professional in her thirties, either still working or lately out of the workforce for a child. The pitch was to someone trying to hold on to an identity while her life rearranged itself around other people. This was not a mom site, she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008, and she did not care whether you had been married.

It worked for a while, the way these sites did. Sections for celebrities and for style, updated on weekdays, and two numbers the company repeated everywhere: two and a half million unique visitors every month, plus a comScore rank of 7 that it said put it above InStyle and Elle in beauty and fashion. The source cited for the second one was an article on BettyConfidential announcing it. In September 2010 AlwaysOn listed the company among its hundred private companies of the year.

~ the record ~

~ the only republican in women's publishing ~

The editorial hire that made people look twice was the first one. Myrna Blyth ran Ladies' Home Journal for twenty-one years and founded More, then wrote a book attacking the women's magazine business she had come out of, and she took the editor's chair at a women's magazine startup. The press release announcing her, which the New York Observer reprinted, led with the phrase "Only Republican in Women's Publishing" and the site's own slogan right behind it. Piscione had been a congressional staffer and a Bush appointee before Silicon Valley. Soledad O'Brien chaired the advisory board. April Daniels Hussar had the editor's chair after her, and was the last to hold it.

~ three years of nobody turning it off ~

The front page stopped moving in April 2017. You can see it in the file sizes. The homepage ran at about 82 KB through 2016, then shed its river of stories in the first week of that month and settled at 48 KB, where it stayed for three more years, still featuring the same January 2017 stories. Behind that frozen page the posting rate ran at two or three pieces a year, mostly sponsored travel, until the last one on 4 November 2019.

An abandoned WordPress install does not sit still, though. By the summer of 2019 the archive crawler was picking up essay-writing service posts published on the live domain, and the homepage's final working capture, from 14 March 2020, carries a block of hidden links to a Ukrainian payday loan site, parked eleven thousand pixels off the left edge of the screen. A week later the host stopped answering. From June 2020 the domain answered with a 114 byte redirect to a parking page, and that is still what it answers with, the registration kept current by somebody who thinks the name is worth holding.

This site was never going to have me as a reader, in any country. What I recognize is the afterlife. The Facebook page is still standing, still carrying the slogan about being your best friend only better. It points its followers at a domain that has been a for-sale sign since before the pandemic.

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