ChickClick

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

~ the obituary ~

chickclick was built for american teenage girls who ran their own websites, and in february 1998 i was a fourteen year old boy in ankara with a 33.6k modem. there is no version of that year in which those two things touch. this one is written entirely from the outside.

it was started by two sisters, heidi and heather swanson. heidi took the pitch to chris anderson, whose imagine media also owned ign, and imagine backed it. the idea was not a magazine. it was an umbrella: several dozen sites that already existed, made by women, gathered behind one front page that sold advertising across the whole set and passed money back to the people writing.

the numbers hold up for the era. wikipedia records over a million visits a month during 1998, its first year. a trade piece the following summer put the merged network, after chickclick absorbed estronet that october, at an average of 35 million page views a month. the staff through all of it was four women.

underneath the advertising network, what it actually handed out was infrastructure. chickmail gave you an email address. chickpages gave you somewhere to put a site, at a moment when that was the entire barrier to publishing anything. those two things are most of why the shutdown note reads the way it does.

~ the case file ~

~ the slogan ~

the line on the front page was girl sites that don't fake it, aimed squarely at the other women's web being assembled at the same time out of venture money and cosmetics advertising. the sections had names like shewire for news and chicklounge for pop culture, and the boards were called razzberry. the affiliated sites ran from career advice at one end to xena at the other, and nothing in between got edited into a house style.

~ the money that arrived and left ~

imagine media's stake was folded into affiliation networks, which renamed itself snowball in august 1999 and went public into the final months of the bubble. that is the entire mechanism of death here. chickclick did not lose its readers and it did not lose an argument with a competitor. the advertising that paid for a network of small independent sites stopped existing during 2001, and snowball closed the portal in march the following year.

~ the note on the door ~

the farewell page went up on 27 march 2002 under the old header graphic, and it is worth reading because almost nobody writing a shutdown notice in that period admitted anything at all. "unfortunately, because of the changes in the economy, we can no longer keep chickclick up and running." then, before a long list of things it told readers to keep doing anyway: "while it is sad to lose chickclick, or any place where women feel they can safely talk about what's happening in their worlds, we know that you will find other communities where you can continue using you voice."

the typo in that last clause is in the original. nobody proofread it because there was nobody left to. the page then sat there unchanged for well over a year, still 1,552 bytes in october 2003, and did not return a 404 until the middle of 2004.

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