BlueLight.com

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

~ the obituary ~

BlueLight.com peaked in the same dial-up years i was living in, but on the wrong continent. I was a teenager in Turkey feeding a 33.6k modem through TTNet, paying by the minute and hating it. Meanwhile Kmart was handing out free american internet named after the flashing blue light that used to signal a discount in its stores. The nostalgia only worked if you had stood in a Kmart, which i never had. The category was familiar to me, the product was not.

It launched in december 1999, majority owned by Kmart and funded by names like SoftBank and Yahoo, out of San Francisco. The pitch was pure retail logic: give people free dial-up, brand it with the store, and watch them shop at Kmart because they felt loyal. It grew fast, the way free things do, and at its height it claimed close to seven million subscribers and a shopping site stapled to the access.

The logic did not hold. People took the free internet and went where everyone went online, to chat rooms and music downloads and the rest, and almost none of it turned into Kmart sales. So the free ride got squeezed. The free service was cut to twelve hours a month, a paid tier at $9.95 arrived, and on 29 august 2001 the free service ended outright. Kmart filed for bankruptcy a few months later, in january 2002, and BlueLight's future went with it.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

Everyone who tried the free-ISP model in this era learned the same thing. Free access attracts users who care about one word, free, and feel no debt to whoever paid for it. Kmart assumed goodwill would convert to spending. It got seven million people who were delighted to use a retailer's bandwidth to do anything but visit that retailer.

~ the day it died ~

The free tier ending in august 2001 was the real death, even though a paid BlueLight ISP limped on for a while afterward. What made it interesting was already gone: the giveaway. Once you were paying $9.95 a month it was just another second-tier ISP, and it was attached to a chain that was months from bankruptcy court. My own dial-up misery in Turkey was at least honest about costing money. BlueLight tried to pretend the internet could be free if you were loyal enough, and the internet declined the deal.

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