Bonus.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Bonus.com opened in january 1997 and i did not have a modem until the year after, so it already had a history by the time i could have loaded anything. That is the small reason i missed it. The bigger one is that it answered a worry that had not arrived in turkey yet. In 1997 the web was not in enough turkish houses for anyone to be anxious about what a child would find in it.

It launched with more than five hundred games and activities, sorted into sections the site called CyberWays, with names like Play and Dissect. The content was the ordinary stuff of the era, coloring pages next to shockwave arcade games, and none of it is why anyone remembers the site.

What people remember is the fence. Bonus.com ran a thing it called NetScooter, which opened a second window and hid the real browser controls behind it, leaving the child a set of buttons that only went where Bonus.com had already agreed to go. No address bar to type into, no back button out of the garden. It was the most literal answer anyone gave to the question of how you let a seven year old on the internet, and it worked by pretending the rest of the internet was not there.

The company behind it was stranger than the site. Appaloosa Interactive had started life in budapest in 1982 as Novotrade International, a hungarian studio that made console games, took the new name in november 1996 and ran out of Mountain View. Bonus.com came out of Appaloosa Online, the internet division it announced the same month. A children's portal in San Francisco built by people whose day job was Ecco the Dolphin.

~ the case file ~

~ the fence around the web ~

The fence paid for itself in a way that reads badly now. Look at the archived page source from 2007 and the walled browser is full of ad slots with their own names: a superbanner across the top, skyscrapers down both sides, something the code calls a cover. The child could not leave the site, and the site sold every wall of the room they could not leave. This was normal. It was also exactly what the american rules of the period were written about, and Bonus.com spent its whole life in the paperwork around what you may and may not collect from a child.

In 2000 it bought Headbone Zone, the Seattle kids site with the chat rooms and the mystery games, and shut it down more or less on arrival. That is the only acquisition anyone remembers Bonus.com making, and it is remembered as a killing rather than a purchase.

~ what it became ~

The ending has no announcement attached to it. Appaloosa Interactive stopped making games in 2006, and the last archived capture of the Bonus.com front page with the games on it is from 5 august 2007. By the first of october the front page was a bare language chooser offering english, hungarian or spanish, forwarding to a thinner rebuild. By september 2008 the page was blank. By that november the domain was serving discount codes under the line "Your Best Bet For Bargains".

It still is, roughly. Bonus.com today is a casino bonus site, which is the joke the domain was always going to make eventually. A word that meant a free game to a nine year old in 1998 turned out to be worth more to the people selling free bets. The fence outlived the garden, and somebody else is standing inside it.

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