Celebdaq

» see bbc.co.uk/celebdaq as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

celebdaq was paid for by the british license fee and it ran on british tabloid coverage. i had neither. july 2002 is a period i was very much online for, on ttnet at home and in cafes when i was not, but the entire game was priced in column inches from newspapers and celebrity weeklies that never crossed into turkey. you could load the page from ankara. you could not read the market.

the bbc did not invent the mechanic. popex.com had been trading shares in musicians since 1998 and the hollywood stock exchange had been doing something similar with films in america for years before that. celebdaq took the popex code, added to it, and put the result behind the license fee where it cost nothing to play. it eventually outlived its own source. popex closed in august 2006 and the bbc version kept going for another three and a half years.

what makes it worth a grave is that a national broadcaster ran a functioning speculative market as a public service. no money went in and no money came out. the thing being speculated on was fame itself, measured by people at the bbc counting how often each name appeared in print.

~ the case file ~

~ how the money worked ~

every new player was handed ten thousand pounds of imaginary cash. you spent it on shares in celebrities, and the price of each one moved with what the rest of the players were doing to it. that half is just a stock market with a silly underlying asset. the half that made it a game was the weekly dividend.

dividends were not random and they were not driven by trading. they were calculated from actual press coverage across a set of daily papers and magazines. so the winning move was never to guess what other players wanted. it was to guess who would be in the papers on thursday. a wedding or a court date converted into a payout you could see coming, provided you read enough gossip to spot it first. the game rewarded a very specific literacy, and it was one that only existed inside the uk.

~ the television version ~

bbc three took the website and made a program out of it, which is a sentence that could only have been written between 2003 and 2004. celebdaq ran on television from 14 february 2003 to 18 march 2004, presented first by paddy o'connell and libby potter and later by jenny eclair. the format was a market report for a market that did not exist, delivered straight.

the site won best entertainment site at the interactive baftas in 2004, which is roughly when the whole thing peaked. sportdaq had arrived in august of the same year to do the same trick with athletes. two share markets, one broadcaster, neither of them holding a single real pound.

~ the cuts ~

celebdaq and sportdaq both closed on friday 26 february 2010, part of a wider trimming of bbc online. the stated reason was that the online operation needed a new and harder focus on quality and distinctiveness. in practice that phrase meant the bbc had been told it was crowding out commercial competitors and had to justify every page it served.

a celebrity share-trading game is a difficult thing to defend in that argument. it is not news and it is not education, and any commercial company could obviously have built one. so it went, along with the sports version, without much of a farewell.

~ the second life ~

at the end of december 2018, nearly nine years after the bbc pulled the plug, a fan brought celebdaq back on their own hosting. it ran until 2024. that is a longer independent run than most revivals manage, and it happened with no broadcaster behind it and nobody counting column inches for a salary.

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