Bread

» see bre.ad as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Around 2011 a lot of smart people convinced themselves that the shortened link was unexploited real estate. Millions of them were being posted every day by people with audiences, each one a piece of attention that passed through a server somebody owned, and nobody was charging rent on it. Bread was the company that charged rent.

The mechanic was simple. You shortened a link through bre.ad and posted it as usual. Whoever clicked landed first on an interstitial that Bread let you design, carrying an advertisement and a note of your own, before being forwarded to the actual destination after about five seconds. Bread called that note a Toast, and clicking it showed you the other people who had liked it, which was the social layer on top of what was otherwise an ad server with a redirect attached.

It was aimed squarely at the people the industry had started calling influencers, in the years before anybody had built them a native way to get paid. Bread raised $3.5 million from an investor list that tells you exactly which world it lived in: Troy Carter, who managed Lady Gaga, next to the fashion designer Marc Ecko. Joe Lonsdale's Formation 8 and Raptor Ventures supplied the venture end of it. The company stayed small, around ten people.

~ the record ~

~ the toast ~

The interstitial has an awful reputation and it earned most of it. Making a reader wait five seconds to reach something they already chose to open is a tax on their patience, paid to someone else, and the web has spent twenty years learning to route around it.

What Bread did differently was tell the person sharing the link that the tax was theirs. The toast carried their words and their design, so the delay carried their voice, and the revenue landed in their account. Adfly had already shown the model worked at the grubby end of the internet, where the links went to file lockers. Bread tried to run the same mechanic in daylight, with brands that cared how they looked.

~ thirty days ~

On 11 October 2013 Yahoo announced it had bought the company. Marissa Mayer's Yahoo was absorbing roughly one startup a month in that period, almost always for the engineers, and Bread was that kind of deal: six people from product and engineering joined the advertising team in Sunnyvale.

The notice Bread posted was unusually blunt about what happened next. Support for existing links would continue for thirty days, until 11 November, and publishers were advised to swap their Bread links out for bit.ly ones in the meantime. The company's goodbye graphic was its own mascot, a cartoon slice of burnt toast with sweat on its face and a speech bubble containing the Yahoo logo.

~ links as infrastructure ~

A shortener is a promise about the future. Every link you hand out is a bet that somebody will keep running a lookup table for as long as the thing you linked to matters, and there is no technical reason for that bet to pay off once the company behind it has been bought.

Bread at least told people the date. Thirty days to go back through everything you had ever posted and replace a link you no longer control, across accounts that in some cases had years of history, is a hopeless job and everyone involved knew it. Whatever share of bre.ad links were still in circulation on 12 November 2013 became dead ends pointing at nothing, in posts whose authors had moved on to the next platform.

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